Irvin Aerospace, Down to earth

Manufacturing in Action, Source : The Manufacturer US

Parachute manufacturer Irvin Aerospace shows no signs of slowing down, Jenn Monroe reports

Ensuring that a product works 100 percent of the time is the goal of most companies, but for Irvin Aerospace it’s a necessity. Irvin manufactures a wide range of deceleration devices—including parachutes—that carry soldiers, space shuttles, and everything in between back to earth safely.

Specifically, Irvin Aerospace designs, develops, and manufactures best-in-class parachutes for space and air vehicle recovery systems, deceleration systems for high-performance aircraft, military personnel parachute systems, cargo parachute systems, ordnance and weapon delivery systems, spin/stall parachute recovery systems, flare chutes, and airbags, and also performs simulations, analyses, and tests. Its corporate headquarters is in Santa Ana, CA.

The company’s roots trace back to the advent of the parachute. The Irving Air Chute Company (yes, the name was misspelled back then) was established more than 85 years ago in Buffalo, NY, by Leslie Irvin, the man who made the first successful free-fall parachute jump in history. Irvin’s design became the industry standard, and his company has manufactured millions of aerodynamic decelerators since 1919.

Irvin’s 100,000-square-foot state-of-the-art manufacturing facility houses engineering design and manufacturing operations, a recent integration that is unique to the industry. Nearly eight years ago Carlos Lopez, director of operations, reorganized the workflow into cells. Three years later, when the company changed hands, the new owners put their full support behind this approach. “Carlos was using a lean approach without calling it lean,” said Dave Berry, president.

Now Irvin Aerospace is implementing lean enterprise across its entire business operation. “This is providing a lot of opportunity for us,” Berry said, “especially in key processes, like the bid and order process. We’re in the early stages of implementing it in our procurement processes.”

This extension of lean into other areas is also helping manufacturing. “We’re getting our suppliers to help us get our materials just in time,” Lopez said, “and that’s helping us financially and yielding a more productive flow. At the same time we’re forecasting with our vendors; in this way we’re creating a partnership with them.”

Berry agreed. “Very simple things have come out of the lean effort,” he said. “Rather than a monthly plan, Carlos works from weekly and daily plans. It’s easier to plan and easier for suppliers to respond to our needs.”

Irvin Aerospace also established and maintains a tight inspection process that is certified to the requirements of ANSI/ISO/ASQ Q9001:2000. “All company employees are responsible for their own products,” he said. “They sew and inspect.” This inspection process is enhanced by tables, built in-house, that are lit so operators can see the stitching of the products. In addition to in-process inspection, all Irvin’s products are inspected before they leave the plant.

Lopez holds suppliers to the same level of quality. Vendors are required to have a certificate of performance and a test report. When raw materials are received, they go to a holding area until Irvin can inspect them. “We inspect all the raw materials before we release them to the floor,” he said, “and we keep track of what we use.”

Irvin follows product flow so closely that it can identify the vendor who supplied a material as well as the operator who made the product, should any quality issues arise. “We keep a record of those tests in-house,” Lopez said. “For every operation we perform, we can recall who did that operation. We keep records for years of who made that specific product and the specific processes and materials used.”

As might be expected, this high quality standard begins in engineering services and often ends with taking a product to a test facility and dropping the parachute. “We have robust quality management,” said Paul Colliver, vice president of sales. “That’s part of our strategy in delivering value. We’re really setting that high standard in reliability.”

Irvin also is setting the standard in state-of-the-art technology. “The parachute industry as a whole has not put much money into new technology until recently,” Berry explained. To stay ahead of its competitors, Irvin Aerospace is taking its cues from the garment industry and has invested in computer-controlled sewing stations and other technologies to increase productivity and quality.

All fabric components used in the company’s products are made in-house, with 90 percent of the operations dedicated to sewing. “We integrate electronics and metal parts into our systems, but we subcontract that work,” Berry said. “But when it comes to sewing, that’s what we do.”

With nearly 500 sewing machines of various gauge types and classes, automatic/manual multi-needle stitching capabilities, automatic webbing cutters, special seam folders, and stencil/silk-screening equipment in the plant, Irvin Aerospace is ready for anything, and that’s usually what it gets.

“We have hundreds of different types of products,” Lopez said. “Usually we’re producing 30 to 40 different products in 10 to 20 different cells. Plus, the products we’re doing in the next six months are not necessarily the same ones we’ll do in the next part of the year. These products have special characteristics that make the process unique. It’s a complex environment in the plant.” Products range from very small (one foot in diameter) to very large (156 feet in diameter) and every size in between.

Quantities also vary, so Irvin has both short- and long-run capabilities. “We make one to 10 units for some customers,” Lopez continued, “and we have some US government contracts where we’re making thousands.”

Irvin’s operations are so flexible and vertically integrated that it can quickly set up a new cell for a new contract and provide all the elements for the cell in-house. “We use our own tables and organize them into cells so product flows naturally through,” Berry added. “We’ve implemented a material handling system that will automatically move the parachutes from one station to the next via rails. We’re the only player in the industry that has implemented that system.”

Irvin is currently working with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a deceleration device for supersonic jets. “To slow down a body moving at two to three times the speed of sound takes really sophisticated fabric technology,” Berry said. Irvin Aerospace is looking forward to other opportunities with NASA as it considers its next steps. “The aging space shuttle needs to be replaced,” said Robert Shiley, general manager of engineering services, “and there are different types of vehicles needed to support NASA, as well as space tourism. There’s a lot of heavy activity in the space program right now.”

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