Having been involved in the construction of many types of aircraft over the years, the site had to undergo significant redevelopment to accommodate the production of the front fuselage cockpit assembly, stage-1 aft fuselage, vertical stabiliser, canards and inboard flaperons of the aircraft developed to spearhead European defence for the next three decades. The final assembly of the advanced swing-role combat aircraft is, of course, undertaken at the company's plant in Warton.

Known as 4 Shed, the facility at Samlesbury features a raised floor mounted on16,000 pedestals to provide easy access to all utilities, as well as allow complete flexibility in the event of reorganisation or modification of the production process. The site boasts four large DS Technologie advanced contouring machines used to produce the centre fuselage frames, a host of 5-axis machining centres for producing jigs and smaller details part, an advanced 10-axis Cincinnati gantry-type V4 contour tape laying machine for composite structures and a $14 million CNC drilling machine for drilling thousands of holes in each front fuselage.




The facility's layout is based on cellular manufacturing, with each product cell being self-managed and responsible for its own performance. "Being a larger product, the front fuselage is split across five cells and 14 workstations," explains Paul Thompson, who is responsible for continuous improvement within the Typhoon Major Units Facility. "Each cell is self contained, with its own point-of-use stock of jigs, parts and tooling, as part of the lean manufacturing strategy."

He says that the current annual build rate for the Typhoon at Samlesbury is 34 but the facility was designed to accommodate an annual build capacity of 72 with a 4.2 day takt time and this will be planned to ramp up to support future orders. So, certain initiatives are aimed at achieving further efficiencies and cost reduction where possible. Tool management is, of course, a core part of the production process and therefore one area of focus.

"As well as providing ownership back to the shopfloor and better traceability of powered tooling and high value bespoke tools such as special high speed steel and solid carbide drills and cutters, we wanted to reduce cost through more effective control," says Mr Thompson. "Our existing system involved tools being kept in a conventional type storage cabinet and the reordering process was subject to the tooling supplier undertaking manual stock checks to assess usage before placing the necessary re-order reports. This proved time consuming and meant that the ownership for the tooling was with the supplier. Consequently, we considered an automated vending and management system."

For this BAE Systems got together with ISIS, which has developed a comprehensive range of tool management systems with a wide range of functions that are proven and can be adapted to meet a specific industry's needs. "Following a tendering process and various best practice visits to existing users of the system we concluded that the ISIS system was compact and had a highly functional but user friendly operating system," he says. "In short this easy-to-use system could offer us the level of control we required and was also able to better handle the, sometimes fragile, tooling we needed to store."




As ISIS' Dominique Alam points out, the system comprises a series of modular drawers that can be individually configured whereas with spiral-type vending systems tooling often has to be repackaged to be accommodated and tooling is dropped during the vending process, thus risking breakage. Moreover, the system is modular and therefore flexible, fitting in well with BAE System's lean manufacturing concept cells and can be quickly reorganised if necessary.

Having decided to trial the system, vending machines were installed within the production facility's structural manufacturing cells. Each machine is equipped with an Advanced Vending Control (AVC) system that can be updated remotely from a central location. Using biometric authentification to gain access, a simplistic user interface and touch screen control enables shopfloor personnel to easily and quickly select various options and obtain the tools required.

"For every cutting tool there is a minimum and maximum quantity preset within the system and once an item reaches the minimum quantity a weekly generated report will automatically reorder up to a maximum agreed quantity. This mitigates the risk of a stock out." says Mr Thompson. "The system will also highlight tool stock that is not being reordered and so allow the user to look at why the tooling is not being used or reduce maximum stock quantities," adds Mr Alam.

As ISIS develops its own software, features can be added according to particular applications and reports can be generated according to a user's specific requirement. The company is also an independent tool vending and management system provider, rather than a tooling supplier which means that, with the automatic system negating the need for a vendor to come on site and continually restock, the end-user is free to use any tooling supplier it chooses.

"While the system has only been in place since the end of last year," continues Mr Thompson, "we have already experienced significant benefit and savings." He says that, though an exact percentage figure is not available, he expects that cost savings will be in the region of between 25-50% on some items - in line with the savings experienced elsewhere where the vending and management system has been used for similar type tools.

"We have proven the benefits of the ISIS vending and management system in 4 shed and have installed a support structure that effectively lays the groundwork for it to be rolled out elsewhere within BAE Systems Samlesbury and other sites," concludes Mr Thompson. "We are now considering using the system for consumable tooling and PPE (Personal Protection Equipment) which, although lower cost, are equally important in terms of availability. Moreover, we are also looking at its role in helping to maintain quality compliance, minimise FOD (foreign object debris) risks and provide full traceability for category one tool control areas."