>> How is the factory for change, given there's a lot of technology around, mobile technology, wireless technologies? And how has that impacted the speed of delivery and the cost of manufacture?
>> Well, when you think of the size of our Everett factory, for example, it's 100 acres, one building.
>> That's in Everett, Washington?
>> Yes. The largest building in the world. And so if you don't have what you need to do your job in terms of information, the plausibility is that you might have to walk a couple of hundred yards. I think the quality and the productivity have increased enormously because of that.
>> So, for example, the manuals, are those all electronic and available to the mechanics and engineers?
>> Yes, so that the descriptions of the parts and the descriptions of the job can be available electronically.
>> That seems like a huge challenge given that an airplane has two to three million parts.
>> Yes, it's one of the technologies that we're working with right now that is actually quite a bit of a challenge is something called Real Time Location Service, or RTLS, and that's a technology that uses the WiFi access points, multiple access points, to look at a signal that comes from an active RFID device, and when that signal comes, then it tries to do some triangulation or time stamping to see what the location of that part was. So that can help you find a part that might be lost and given the size of our factories, if something gets lost it can take a long time to find. I can remember the days when we had a flier come by and they ask you, have you seen this part, and that part is 20 feet long and 10 feet high.
Laughter
>> Not exactly a needle in a haystack.
>> And obviously, worth a lot of money. But the other thing is then tracking parts through progression from workstation to another in the factory to know whether your progress is moving the way it should.
>> Now, is this technology deployed widely or is it in the test phase?
>> This is rather new technology. We have some installed at a couple of locations. I think you'd characterize it a little bit more as pilot.
>> Pilot for an active RFID implementation?
>> Yes. Yes.
==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====
