Seeing six sigma

By getting up close and personal with their digital prototypes, U.S. Army engineers have stepped up Six Sigma implementation and virtually done away with the need for hardware prototypes, saving millions of dollars in the process. Design engineers at the U.S. Army’s Armament Research Development and Engineering Center—Rock Island have developed a design method that relies on visualization and virtual-reality technology to immerse engineers in the design of U.S. military vehicles. The new method, dubbed the advanced visualization process, or AVP, has delivered significant cost and time savings to boot, to the tune of up to $4.4 million and 3.8 years as compared to the same project completed without AVP. That process, which moves designs from concept to finished product without hardware prototyping, calls upon a systems engineering method based on Lean Six Sigma principles, said Joe Kleiss, a Navy veteran and project manager for the Armament Research and Development Engineering Center, or ARDEC, in Rock Island, Ill. Kleiss began AVP in June 2005. He had received training in Six Sigma principles; then he had a light-bulb moment: Six Sigma and computer visualization technologies could be a natural fit. Via the technology, AVP brings together all design disciplines, decision makers, and end-users early in the design process, he said. “The ability to see digital prototypes early on and modify them iteratively provides a way for each of these groups to contribute to the end system design from the very beginning of a project,” Kleiss said. One big element of the AVP is the Immersive Engineering Laboratory, which uses a CAVE, a room-size virtual reality system in which users can interact, hands-on, with three-dimensional digital prototypes of systems.