General Dynamics workers laid off

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

About 45 General Dynamics Armament and Technical Products employees in Marion learned Thursday their jobs are being cut over the next few weeks.
According to a release from James D. Losse, General Dynamics’ vice president and general manger of advanced materials, the layoffs are “part of a broad program to improve its competitiveness that also includes the introduction of Lean Manufacturing/Six Sigma techniques and other efforts to improve the company’s ability to compete.”
The jobs affected a range from production operations to support functions.
“Employees whose jobs are being eliminated will leave the company over the course of the next several weeks, and will receive a variety of benefits and services to assist them,” the release said.
The company employs more than 600 locally.
Company officials had no other comment about the layoffs.
Located at 150 Johnston Road, the Marion site is approximately 1 million square feet of roofed floor space and comprises three main plants.
The Marion employees produce components for a wide variety of aircraft and vehicles. Products include radomes for aircraft and composite aircraft parts, as well as vehicle-mounted shelter systems. 
Marion Operations was acquired in 2002 when General Dynamics purchased the Rosewell, Ga.-based Advanced Technical Products, Inc.  In 2003, General Dynamics Armament and Technical Products moved its Resin Transfer Molding (RTM) aircraft composites manufacturing to Marion Operations from DeLand, Fla.
Last month, General Dynamics was awarded a $48 million multi-year contract by Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co. to produce components of the F-22 Raptor fighter aircraft. Production and program management is performed at General Dynamics’ Advanced Materials Marion with the first deliveries being made this month.
Gail K. Warner, senior director of communications, said Thursday the Lockheed Martin contract did not create new jobs. She said there was “no need to hire to cover it as it was a follow-on contract from Lockheed Martin and nowhere near the incremental sales necessary to sustain current employment levels.”
General Dynamics, headquartered in Falls Church, employs approximately 82,600 people worldwide and had 2006 revenues of $24.1 billion.  The company is a market leader in business aviation; land and expeditionary combat systems, armaments and munitions; shipbuilding and marine systems; and information systems and technologies, company literature said.
Six Sigma is a statistics-based approach to improving product quality, customer satisfaction and ultimately manufacturers’ profit.
Michigan-based Proforma Corp., a vendor of business process management software, said in a manual that “Six Sigma, pioneered by Motorola and popularized by General Electric, is one of the primary quality initiatives of our time. Six Sigma has been billed as a critical business tool for the 21st century. In a fast changing business environment, companies have used Six Sigma initiatives to gain improvements in process and product quality. The success that companies have enjoyed lies in the ability to tie project results directly to improved customer satisfaction ratings and bottom line savings.
“The name, Six Sigma, is taken from the approach’s statistical roots. If a product or process has a six sigma level of consistency, then it is experiencing only 3.4 defects per million. In other words, six sigma products and processes are 99.99966 percent consistent. In order to reach these results, Six Sigma efforts pursue the following five objectives: define the problem area in objective terms; measure the performance of products and processes; analyze the problems to identify root causes; improve the results by redesigning processes and reducing variation; and control the processes to ensure the improvements are permanent.”
Lean manufacturing is a popular, widely-used term for reducing labor, investment costs and manufacturing site size to lower production overhead.