Photo By Matthew Montgomery | Art Butteling, Defense Contract Management Agency Boeing Long Beach C-17 quality...... read more read more
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LONG BEACH, Calif. — Defense Contract Management Agency personnel across the globe support the Foreign Military Sales program as part of normal operations. The requirements for most FMS products follow the same contractual agreements as those produced for DCMA’s Department of Defense and other federal agency customers. On rare occasions, DCMA personnel must deviate from standard practices to support unique FMS requirements — something the DCMA Boeing Long Beach team in California is experiencing now.
“Our oversight on remaining FMS C-17 aircraft is going to deviate from our normal procedures because the planes won’t go on contract until almost at the end of production,” said Air Force Maj. Joshua Holland, C-17 Quality Assurance Group chief. “To complete the QA process we will have to review third-party activities to ensure the work was completed successfully by the Boeing Company.”
Holland said Boeing was in the process of producing C-17’s for sale to foreign military customers, but the contract negotiations took longer than expected. It would have been costly to shut down production awaiting contract finalization so Boeing, along with the Air Force Program Office and DCMA, began looking at alternative ways to ensure oversight after contracts were in place.
“Safety of flight policy is very specific and states that we cannot waive our surveillance,” said Jerry Shipp, C-17 production team leader, referring to DCMA Instruction 308, “Safety of Flight – QA.” “It also states that any deviation from our surveillance plan must get approval through headquarters – specifically the Quality Assurance Executive Director, Mike Shields.
“Deviating from policy is something we take very serious and try to avoid whenever possible,” said Shields. “Limiting exceptions to policy ensures we’re speaking as one team, with one voice. We also know that every situation is unique, and on very rare occasions, we have to change our way of doing business, which is why we have a policy on deviations. We’re proud of the hard work completed at DCMA Boeing Long Beach and glad we could assist them with their challenging endeavor.”
With SOF and quality assurance in mind, the team sat down with the contractor and program office to determine what SOF characteristics could not be inspected postproduction.
“We narrowed it down to eight critical areas, mainly bolts connecting the wings to the fuselage, which would induce structural risk if verified after production. Everything else could be accomplished by taking up liners, pulling off panels, removing parts in certain areas and reviewing work out of sequence,” said Shipp.
After the eight areas were identified, it was up to Boeing to come up with a unique solution to ensure production could continue. Holland said their solution was to bring in an unbiased third-party to conduct the oversight and digitally record all of the necessary work performance so it could be reviewed by DCMA once the contract was finalized.
“Once they had a plan in place, Boeing brought in DCMA and the program office to explain what would be different about the oversight process and how they were going to mitigate risk so the customers would still get the same type of product oversight they would normally get,” said Holland.
Once all parties were comfortable with the solution, the DCMA Boeing Long Beach team began the process of gaining approval to deviate from policy.
“A lot of people and polices were involved in making this step happen,” said Shipp. “The Operations and Quality Directorates put in a lot of effort to make sure this plan would work and fulfill the contract requirements. It required internal, external and coordinated efforts across the board to make it happen.”
The already challenging process increased due to changes in the program office leadership and location, as well as changing DCMA policy during the process.
“To make it even more challenging, Boeing also went through an organizational restructure,” said Holland. “Through all the changes and challenges, the flexibility of the DCMA team enabled us to finish up the requirements and proceed with the program.”
The first C-17 approved for delivery under the new plan went to the Kuwaiti Air Force. Shipp said the deviated plan broke overall surveillance into two distinct parts.
“The cumbersome part was verifying the credentials of the third-party chosen to perform the oversight in lieu of DCMA, then watching hours of video showing them conducting the required oversight,” said Shipp. By watching the recordings, DMCA personnel were able to verify torques and calibrations to fulfill the contract requirements.
“As we continue to move from detection to prevention, we have to refocus on suppliers providing objective evidence of controls that demonstrate proper outcomes, namely contractual conformance,” said Shields. “In this case, the videos served as the objective evidence necessary to for us to verify conformance and ensure confidence in the final product.”
The second part of the quality inspection followed a more standard quality approach.
“Considering we had to go in after production and conduct surveillance, I think everything came together really well,” said Barry Linture, a quality assurance specialist responsible for inspecting the Kuwaiti C-17. “In some cases it meant removing panels and parts of the plane so we could verify the work was accomplished, but the contractor was very responsive to all the requests and everyone was very clear on what we had to do. We have a really tight team here and I know that contributed greatly to the successful inspection of the aircraft.”
Air Force Col. Dustin Ziegler, DCMA Boeing Huntington Beach commander, said his team’s creativity in dealing with challenges, and their efforts working with the program office, contributed to the aircrafts successful delivery.
“The primary role of the program office, in the context of ensuring the viability of the platform and delivering it to our mission partners, is making sure it is airworthy,” said Ziegler. “They have to preform that function with us as their proxy, here onsite doing the work to validate for the government that this is an airworthy aircraft. They were very flexible with this process and one of the good news stories is our ability to alleviate their concerns about the process.
“It’s all about risk mitigation,” continued Ziegler. “Everything we would have been able to do from the beginning, we’ve been able to do afterward. I feel as confident and safe getting on the Kuwaiti aircraft as I would any of the other C-17s we’ve inspected.”
| Date Taken: | 02.10.2015 |
| Date Posted: | 02.10.2015 16:41 |
| Story ID: | 154140 |
| Location: | LONG BEACH, CA, US |
| Web Views: | 199 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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