Know your Manufacturing Risk: MRLs
An Intro to Manufacturing Readiness Levels
An old mentor once told me, “we can manufacture anything, but you might pay more than you want to and wait longer than you expect to”. So when I joined Prime Movers Lab a few weeks back and was asked about scaling manufacturing, one of the first things to jump to my mind was “manage the risk”; i.e. how do we make this new product without extra cost and in a timely manner?
Enter the Manufacturing Readiness Level (MRL) and assessment. The MRL is a scale from 1–10, where each phase is assessed for maturity and then the whole value stream is assessed, so you have a complete manufacturing maturity picture. Whether you are a scrappy start-up or a 100 year old blue chip manufacturing titan, you have limited time and resources to achieve your ultimate goal; understanding where it can go wrong (or right) early on, will save significant aggravation later (and likely will create a better return on investment).
Originally designed for the US DoD in the early 2000’s to be used in conjunction with the product TRL (Technology Readiness Level, which my colleague Carly wrote about last year), the main idea of the MRL, and assessment thereof, is to provide a transparent status to the folks managing the new process and to give everyone an understanding of the level of challenge that lay ahead.
Why the MRL tool:
The assessment of your MRLs helps you take a hard look at the entire lifecycle / value chain of your product and break it down so you know where to focus. It standardizes the level of risk & development into a metric that anyone, from the technician building the process to the CEO running the business, can quickly grasp; if you are the director of finance, it helps you understand the level of capitalization and if you are the program manager, it helps you communicate to your customers the progress on the program. It can also be used when contracting out development activities, and written into the contract as part of any milestones agreements.
When I was a young production manager working on large airplane structures, our team set up a production line with several large pieces of capital equipment. One piece was a CNC gantry with a conventional machining head and a water jet head for rapid carbon fiber removal. We also were installing a few carbon fiber lay up robots further up the production line (these are the robots that lay carbon fiber, making the part). After completing an initial assessment, we determined that the lay up robots were a low MRL, so we had a whole team developing and productionizing that process. What we did not assess correctly was the MRL on the waterjet cutter head, as part of gantry assessment. It turned out that the set up wasn’t ready to do the high speed cutting we had planned. So the waterjet head sat idly by for a few years until we could build a development budget to get it working correctly. A correctly executed MRL at the start of the project would have prevented this situation!
Let’s assume we’re building an airplane. Here is what the process might look like at a summary level:
- Scope your assessment and which stages of the value chain you want to include/exclude : for example, you may want to include all the assembly stages of building an airplane but not machining the subcomponents
- Break the stages down by process / techniques: the assembly stage may include bolting the frame together, fastening on the wing skins, installing the hydraulics, and running the electrical wiring
- Gather a cross functional team, including an outside set of eyes: bring in management, assemblers, ME, design, facilities, finance, supply chain, etc; I like to include HR/Talent folks because they ask insightful questions
- Status product TRL levels of the product for risk of change: if you change materials from aluminum to carbon fiber or significantly change dimensions of your wing to grow 3 feet, you drive risk in manufacturing; it’s happened to me multiple times
- Walk through each stage, looking for producibility/achievability of key characteristic risks, availability issues, cost/schedule trade-offs, etc: and seeing actual processes & parts is way better than looking at powerpoint; and you get your steps in
- Identify any areas where further analysis is required: start a side log and set up dedicated follow on sessions; i.e. will this robot actually drill a 1in whole through 3in of carbon fiber, 2000x per day?
- Re-baseline any plans to understand schedule implications (if used in conjunction with maturity gates, identify transition plans): moving the schedule out is pretty typical in aerospace…
Depending on the value stream, the MRL can be done in a few hours or a few days. But give it the time it deserves. We once ran through the assessment, and luckily we did because we found that some of the cleaning processes would have deteriorated our seals. If we had continued, we likely would have shipped bad products and created even bigger problems.
My thoughts on doing an MRL assessment:
First and foremost, you need to be completely honest with yourselves when you are doing this assessment. If you gloss over an issue, it will likely bite you in the rear 10-fold later on in the project (I will cover my view of the 10–10–10 rule in a later blog). And you may miss an opportunity to take time or cost out of the ramp up. If you’re a small business or startup, the process may seem burdensome so tailor it down but make sure you give it the time and attention it deserves. As I mentioned above, if we hadn’t caught the issues above, we would have spent a lot more time and money fixing any recall issues.
Secondly, engage the team: the full team. When you are reviewing your process, have the subject matter experts there, have someone dedicated to facilitating the assessment, and have someone come in with an “outside set of eyes”. I can remember sitting in a review to determine if we were at full production level. We had invited the machinist who ran the process; he flagged that he slowed the machine down when he got to a certain point in the process to hit the tolerances required. It was a light bulb moment. We realized if we didn’t fix the process, we were never going to hit customer demand.
All up, the MRL process is as beneficial to long term success as a good budgeting process and a robust hiring process; knowing where your risks and opportunities are is a good thing and worth the effort.
The MRLs are:
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