We’re very excited to announce that Virgin Orbit has been recognized by Frost & Sullivan in the 2018 Manufacturing Leadership Awards. The Manufacturing Leadership Awards honor manufacturing companies and leaders that are influencing the future of global manufacturing. Mike Miller, Senior VP of Program Management of the LauncherOne Program, was honored as a winner under the Engineering and Production Technology Leadership category for his work on the program. There to accept this award were Virgin Orbit’s Sr. Enterprise Systems Manager, Andrzej Gorcya and Sr. Business Systems Analyst, Darren Buonaguidi, who both played key roles in the digitization of manufacturing operations.
The commercial space industry, although emerging, is very competitive. Everything must be lined up for production—from acquiring materials to hiring people—even though the technology has not yet launched or been proven successful. Building the product to scale heavily relies on engineering and R&D initiative, and it burns through a lot of capital.
Virgin Orbit selected iBase-t to help manage its manufacturing floor to support both the ramp-up from prototype to production and an aggressively increasing production rate. The LauncherOne team at Virgin Orbit selected iBase-t’s Solumina to address a host of needs, including paperless work instructions, real-time visibility, work order completion management, and synchronization and control of production operations. To achieve these objectives, Solumina Process Planning, Shop Floor Execution and Shop Floor Quality functionality were deployed with no configurations. iBase-t enabled a quick roll-out by a feature-rich, well defined and documented set of setup functions.
Solumina enables Virgin Orbit to conduct research, create prototypes and record critical data while also allowing them to set up operations properly in anticipation of the launch and production. The recognition from the Manufacturing Leadership Awards shows that Virgin Orbit is a true leader in the competitive commercial space industry.
