Describe your customer:
Raytheon is a $20 billion defense electronics and systems integration company with operations in the US and 70 other countries. One of the largest defense contractors in the world, Raytheon originally manufactured radio tubes. It subsequently developed the first guided missiles, and is known for converting defense technologies into products for commercial markets. Today, Raytheon has more than 100,000 employees in six companies. Its core businesses include defense and commercial electronics, business aviation and special mission aircraft.

Describe the need you addressed for your customer:
Raytheon needed a Web-based, knowledge-sharing tool and services that would allow executives, and team members in 70 countries to share information and track projects. The tool was to be an integral part of Raytheon’s company-wide Six-Sigma initiative—an across-the-board managerial effort aimed at increasing communication, co-ordinating and streamlining project management, leveraging knowledge capital, reducing cycle lead time, and increasing productivity— all in a customer-focused process including suppliers, engineers, manufacturing, procurement, and marketers. Raytheon’s main goal was to enhance company-wide knowledge sharing so as to reduce "bottlenecks" and achieve cost savings of some $200M a year.

Among other requirements, Raytheon required cost-effective service, training and hosting of a Web-based tool that would:

• -Allow stakeholders to easily and simultaneously share knowledge and communicate across divisional, corporate and national boundaries.
• Organize information by project, function and business hierarchy, so managers within a division could track progress on their projects, and also share information across divisional and company boundaries.

• -Allow searches by keyword, tools, statistics, subject expert, and document. The tool also had to allow document attachment, links to related databases, export to Excel, and the archiving and retrieval of information going back 20 years or more.
• 
  -Offer team-based collaboration functionality including: e-mail notification of project events; team member names and roles; and project management capability. Data input fields requirements included: project descriptions; locations; objectives; problems addressed; potential benefits; lessons learned; and benefits achieved.
• Integrate Raytheon’s Six-Sigma language and structure.

Overview:
Cambridge Interactive configured and customized a version of Power Steering to support Raytheon’s methodologies, helped to deploy it across their different businesses, and continues to offer training, maintenance, and technical and user support. Our solution includes developing a structure for knowledge-sharing that supports Raytheon’s Six Sigma methodology, customizing the user-interface; and enhancing Raytheon’s knowledge-sharing capability.

The basic tool:
Power Steering is a server-side java tool set based on standard technologies, including relational database servers and java application servers. It works with almost all browsers and SMTP e-mail systems, is portable across operating systems, and is compatible with most existing technology. Its three-tiered architecture (user interface, business objects, and data layers) relies on business "objects" to track people, projects, metrics, and documents. The user interface is easily customizable, and all business objects have shared capabilities for permissioning, archiving and mapping into a company’s organizational structure. The central database provides a framework for structuring information. The application is hosted on dual Windows NT servers.

The Solution:
e-Management consulting:
In developing a solution for Raytheon, we worked with different types of users (executives, experts, champions, team members and administrators) to determine which of Power Steering’s broad set of features would be most useful to the company. The users chose five main features: creating and updating projects; posting documents, creating discussion items for team collaboration, tracking financial data, and visibility –i.e. the ability to pull reports on individual projects or portfolios, in relation to both individual business units and the corporation as a whole. The solution was to be based on minimum requirements for knowledge sharing, and for managing whole projects.

Configuration and Customization:
We reconfigured Power Steering to accommodate Raytheon’s needs for accessing data--that is, according to the steps involved in Six Sigma: by business process, function, leadership type, Six Sigma step, region, and tool. We also created a personalized user interface and added such client-specific features as a financial tracking module, "a lessons learned capability" to support knowledge sharing, an advanced search feature to allow users to find specific project information over thousands of projects. Additional functionality includes enhanced "drill-down" and "roll-up" capabilities that allows users to break out individual project data in relation to other projects, overall programs, corporate divisions and the company as a whole.

Deployment and Support
We then assembled teams to determine who would use the tool (initially managers, and, subsequently, project team members), and worked with each business to define a deployment strategy. We also developed and are currently running a training program which consists of Web-and-telephone- based group training and two-day group sessions in California, Texas, Massachusetts, Kansas, and the UK.

As a feature of the basic product, we offer ongoing hosting and training, as well as tech-to-tech and telephone support.

 Benefits Raytheon has realized:
The Power Steering initiative is still in pilot but has already had positive results.

In the words of June Hatfield, Raytheon’s Six-Sigma Champion: "Power Steering allows us to track projects for knowledge sharing among those who have learned the Six Sigma process. For example, division managers can ‘drill down’ to see what is happening in their own projects. For each project, the tool provides a history of the project and metrics for measuring how well teams are doing. A manager can search the Web site to see where the team is on a circuit board assembly. Or, [moving across functions,] if the procurement department sees that engineering is waiting for a part, they can determine that it would be more cost-effective to pay more for a single part rather than wait to order in bulk. Another benefit is that Power Steering brings together people to share their experiences from different businesses all over the world. Project members company-wide can ask, ‘Who has done something before, and what did they learn?’ People are learning that they don’t need to start from the beginning; they can take lessons from people or teams that have done something before and make improvements. They can visualize the Six Sigma process. The tool affords a common language and provides opportunities for collaboration. Its main benefits are that it gives people the ability to communicate, it gives project visibility and it provides a common, standard framework for reporting."