Utilizing a Trusted Partner for Large-Scale Aerospace Document Reformatting

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Overview

United Launch Alliance (ULA) is the industry leader in the development of rockets and the launching of satellites for national defense and government agencies including NASA and commercial clients. Founded in 2006 as a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, ULA has been racing to meet the exponentially growing needs of the aerospace industry.

Problems

ULA had a critical need to convert and update all their schematic drawings for their launch pads to a new format using the Zuken E3 drawing tool. This was a sizeable resource-intensive project with a hard deadline, but with other priority projects, ULA had a significant resource constraint and needed to turn to a partner.

Solution

Having established themselves as a trusted partner, PDS was engaged to own this entire effort. PDS assembled a full project team in an accelerated fashion and immediately began delivering results. As each schematic section was completed, it was released into the ULA document control system and was immediately used by ULA personnel. This meant that ULA was able to benefit from the PDS efforts starting nearly from Day-1 through to completion.

During the project, the scale of the effort increased significantly because these schematics touched every aspect of the Electrical Ground Support Equipment (EGSE) used to support the rocket launches. Despite the incredible scarcity of these resources, PDS was able to scale a new team and project, similar to the first, in order meet the critical timelines. PDS completed this multi-year engagement on time and on budget, delivering critical assets used daily by ULA resources.

ULA was able to leverage their partnership with PDS to not only realize the tactical benefits of the schematics, but in doing so, were able to maintain the focus on their other priorities and their larger strategy.