In October 2024, Lockheed Martin's Missiles and Fire Control Production Operations team opened its Advanced Manufacturing Technology Center in Grand Prairie, TX. The AMT center is a collaborative, connected, and flexible environment designed to enable rapid development and deployment of manufacturing technology solutions and training for teams. This interview is an abbreviated conversation from the ASSEMBLY Audible podcast with George Kaniamos, director of the AMT. For the entire conversation, listen to the podcast. 

Jennifer Pierce: Tell us about the AMT center, why you built it, and what will happen there.

George Kaniamos: The Advanced Manufacturing Technology Center represents a commitment by Lockheed Martin to stay at the forefront of manufacturing innovation. It helped solidify all of our advanced manufacturing technologies, organizations, and centers that we have worldwide into a single hub and a node where they can all come together and develop in what we call a sandbox environment. They can experiment, develop, deploy, and play in different environments. Engineers, technologists, technicians, program managers, and whoever can come can collaborate, build, test, and deploy different innovative technologies that can help support our production challenges and needs across our factories.

The goal of the Innovation Center is twofold. First, it was to solve any immediate problems that exist in our factories, in any factory. Engineers can come, develop new solutions, test them, and then deploy them rapidly across the business. But the second goal is to establish those future state manufacturing processes where this AMT center can allow us to de-risk some of these new technologies and enable the teams to pilot them in a controlled environment before integrating them into high rate production type environments.

JP: I pulled a quote from the press release about the opening of the Center: "The AMT Center gives us the ability to accelerate concurrent engineering across the enterprise, where design and manufacturing engineers can collaborate in a physical space much earlier in the product development cycle to bring products to market faster that are producible at scale." Can you talk a little about the importance of collaboration early on in product development?

GK: Sure. So, let's take a step back real quick and think about the entire product life cycle. I would say 80 to 90 percent of the cost of a product is baked into the concept and the design phase. That's a tough thing to shift later in the manufacturing process. So by performing what we call concurrent engineering, it's really manufacturing engineers who are professionals in our factory in our manufacturing processes, partnering with our design engineers so that when we develop a new product, we can break down some of these individual functional silos and design silos and help design for, let's just say X, if you want to design for automation, let's design so that [the product can be produced with automated assembly and] test equipment. Let's design so that we can additively manufacture products with unique shapes and designs that might optimize our manufacturing process and provide some level of performance optimization.

JP: What new technologies are engineers experimenting with at the Center? Is there anything that you can tell us about?

GK: There's a lot that I can tell you about. The AMT Center, being a hub, has a lot of technologies. We do a lot with collaborative robots, also known as cobots. These robotics help us really streamline repetitive and ergonomically challenging tasks. If it's dull, dangerous, or dirty, it's usually a pretty good candidate for automation. We have additive manufacturing equipment, also known as 3D printing, which is another major focus for us at Lockheed Martin. Additive manufacturing allows us to create complex geometries that just aren't possible with traditional machining capabilities. There's also metrology and scanning equipment, computer vision, and things like that.

But it's not just the hardware side that the AMT Center brings to the table. We also do quite a bit on the software side. How do we develop integrations where we can maintain the digital thread throughout our entire product lifecycle? How do we develop the insights, leverage the data that we currently have with AI and machine learning, and really put all of that digital technology to work and continue to push our customers forward? To help push forward the needs of our customers, put those in the forefront, and help drive solutions for them as we move forward?

JP: What are some of the biggest challenges of manufacturing something like missiles? And how might technology help overcome those challenges?

GK: I'm sure you can appreciate the level of complexity that goes into developing something like this.

The requirements are crazy stringent. Very, very complex. The requirements for precision, reliability, and scalability. If you think about an entire missile system, we can spend quite a bit of time designing a system. Well, you spend almost the same, if not more time, designing a system to perform a function right. Well, you spend almost the same amount of time designing the system to not do what you designed it to do, if you know what I mean. You need these systems to be able to perform in a way that is very, very expected. That takes quite a bit of effort and technology. So, considering we need these systems to work the first time, every time, and flawlessly in the field, there are a lot of things that go into it. 

Automation helps us out quite a bit. The automation of robotics is an important piece of this. The technology behind additive manufacturing helps us in the missile production world, trying to develop geometries that are just not obtainable using traditional machining types of environments. And, you know, maintaining that digital thread that we talked about on the software side is also another area. It's a challenge for manufacturing, especially in the missile environment, which means we need to be able to maintain a level of conformity with these products all the way through the manufacturing process and across different factories around the country. And so, that becomes a complicated challenge without trying to leverage a lot of this technology. As technology gets better, processing power gets better, and AI technology gets better, we continue to apply and deploy those types of new technologies across our entire manufacturing process to see the outcomes that we need. 

There's a piece of this that people have a tendency to forget about, which is the people. When we talk about the biggest challenges of manufacturing, our biggest enablers are the people building these products. Some of these people are folks who have served in the military and were able to reap the benefit of the cloak of protection of these products when they served. And they bring that back into their jobs every day. So there's the mission and people's ability to relate to the mission, which brings that back. Without that, I don't care what system you're automating; you don't get the same output.

JP: Tell us about Lockheed's 1LMX plan for digital transformation. What does digital transformation look like for a defense contractor, and what are the program's goals?

GK: So, 1LMXis Lockheed Martin's enterprise-wide transformation strategy. It's more than just adopting new tools; it's how we weave a digital thread through the entire life cycle of the product, through all of our systems, and everything from design and engineering through manufacturing into sustainment as one unified thread. Now, for a defense contractor like Lockheed, a transformation program like that isn't just about adopting new tools, although that is part of the strategy; it's about enabling faster, more informed decision-making, improving efficiency, and delivering better outcomes for our customers. So, in essence, it's about driving speed, agility, insights, and competitiveness. That is what we really end up trying to shoot for. And that's what digital transformation activity is intended to be. So, at its core, it'll aim to create a seamless flow of data across the product life cycle. It'll allow us to simulate product scenarios. 

So, if you think about the entire thing, we'll call it the model-based enterprise. You have a concept; you design a concept. You'll simulate that design in the digital environment. And before you do anything in the digital environment, before you buy any equipment, before you buy any tooling, or you do anything like that, in a digital and a virtual environment, you simulate the performance of the product, and you also simulate the manufacturing of that product. Once you perfect that, you start in the physical environment, putting together your manufacturing processes, your factories, and everything else. And that really helps. That's parallel with concurrent engineering. That's essentially what that is intended to be. How do you develop and build in the virtual before you do anything in the physical? It reduces span times and the cost of poor quality. It reduces cost, and, more importantly, it gives us real-time information on our processes; it also helps improve our quality, maximizes our efficiency, and provides our customers and our warfighters the tools that they need to be able to sustain whatever it is that they're doing in the field.

To learn more about the AMT Center, visit www.lockheedmartin.com.