How Leonardo DRS avoids non-compliant requirements

Let’s get started. Hello, everyone. My name is Claire Whelan, and I’m on the marketing team here at VisibleThread. Welcome to today’s webinar. We are joined today by U.S.-based defense contractor Leonardo DRS. We will discuss how they use VT Docs to ensure their requirements are assigned and categorized correctly for cross-functional teams. Before we begin, I’d like to quickly go through some housekeeping. Today’s session will be about 45 minutes long. We have a question facility, so if you have any questions, please submit them there for the Q&A session at the end. We also have a survey at the end of the webinar, and we would greatly appreciate your feedback. This session is being recorded, and we will email you the slides and recording in a few days. It will also be available on our website. Now, let’s meet our speakers. I’m delighted to welcome Paul Pilkington and Jim Conyers from Leonardo DRS. Paul is the Senior Manager of Engineering Excellence and has been with Leonardo DRS for ten years. Jim is currently the Engineering Manager of the Commercial and Marine Systems Engineering Group. Also on the call today, we have VisibleThread’s Customer Success Manager, David Galgan. So let’s get started. Over to you, David. Thanks, Claire. I appreciate the introduction. Hello, everyone. Welcome again to our webinar series. I’m really happy to have one of our prime customers with us today—Leonardo DRS. We have been working closely with them for a number of years, and it has been an exciting collaboration where we have been able to assist in a key element of their proposal process. To give you a little background from the VisibleThread side, today we will be looking at the VT Docs platform—primarily at document shredding and matrix creation, and how leveraging dictionaries can help with that. Our agenda for today: First, we will provide some background, specifically why we started this project and some of the key challenges for cross-functional teams in any manual review context. This is especially relevant when working outside of the engineering team, and we’ll explore this in more depth. Then we’ll look at Leonardo DRS’s process in particular and how we helped automate certain elements of their requirement traceability matrix creation, as well as the successful results we achieved. Next, we’ll dive into how we did that using VT Docs and go through a direct demo where we will actually show the creation of the requirement traceability matrix, how we augment that, and how Leonardo DRS has creatively and innovatively used VT Docs to achieve time savings and other benefits from our collaboration. Without further ado, let’s look at some of the key challenges. From discussions with our customer base, I’m out there every day speaking with customers large and small, and time and again, we see these key challenges. In particular, when working with Paul and Jim, they highlighted some key points: the process is manually intensive. You’re dealing with documents that are hundreds of pages long, and you’re relying on disparate teams to filter through and account for all nontechnical requirements. This leads to an inefficient review cycle and the risk of missing certain requirements or encountering challenges with revision control when amendments are made. It can take several days to parse, assign, and distribute these requirements to various teams, resulting in inefficient use of resources, multiple people reviewing the same documents for similar things, and inconsistencies in the review management process. Eventually, these requirements are returned to the proposal manager, leading to the common concern of human error in the proposal process. These issues aren’t necessarily intentional, but just the reality of time constraints, which can lead to missed requirements and unnecessary scope changes. There are also behavioral challenges. Engineering teams are well-versed in scrubbing and parsing documents and handling requirements, but other adjacent disciplines—like supply chain or manufacturing—may not be as evolved or accustomed to these requirements processes. Paul, I know this is something you have a long history with. I guess you could speak to these challenges as well as I could. Yeah, and I can add that before VisibleThread, there would typically be a proposal kickoff. We’d receive an RFP from a customer, and then there would be a shared file with a lot of statements of work or specifications. Each discipline would be left to sift through this documentation on their own. When you introduce VisibleThread and begin shredding these documents, it becomes possible to assign ownership of the requirements. Engineers are used to dividing up technical specifications—such as mechanical, electrical, or software requirements—and then digesting them. But other disciplines, such as manufacturing or quality, may not be as developed or as familiar with these requirements processes. We’ve run into problems where nontechnical requirements, those that are in the contract but don’t necessarily impact the product we’re designing, were missed by these teams. Jim, you’ve been involved in this on a daily basis. Could you give us a bit of background on your current process and share your perspective? Sure. This is a simplified view of how we handle various RFPs and requests for quotes that come in from customers. Typically, when they come in, we do a first pass to determine if we will bid or not. There are some RFPs that may not align with our capabilities. Once we decide to bid, we set up a proposal team. Depending on the complexity, we use VT Docs to shred the statement of work, technical specifications, and any other documentation to ensure we are covering all requirements. Step one is to use VT Docs to shred the documents. We have been doing this for a while now. The next step is to determine our technical offering—what products or services we would offer—and then develop a proposal outline and begin writing it. This includes pricing development. Part of this process involves developing the requirements traceability matrix, which is especially crucial for large and complicated proposals. This can be very time and cost-intensive. The macro that was developed helps us organize all the outputs, making it clear when we communicate to our internal management and our customers what exactly we are bidding on, what we are compliant with, and what exceptions or clarifications we may need. This creates a great framework for clear communication, ensuring each function contributes, and ultimately helps us feel confident that we have covered all bases in our final proposal. Today, we’re going to look at that in more detail and see how VT Docs has helped with the automation of this process. We will cover five key steps. The first two steps involve starting outside of VT Docs to address potential silos of information. VT Docs helps break down these silos by initiating collaboration across departments to build dictionaries. For those familiar with VT Docs, you know about dictionaries, but I’ll provide some background as we go through this. We then leverage these dictionaries to shred documents, outlining where the requirements are located using our matrix shred within VT Docs. We then run the custom macro we developed in collaboration with DRS to replace their manual process. We’ll also look at how this macro makes feedback collection with cross-functional teams much more streamlined and ultimately allows us to summarize and report on compliance, results, and the handling of requirements. The first part of this is building our dictionaries. Paul, could you speak to how the collaboration element was important here? Correct. We worked with a gentleman on the proposal team from VisibleThread, and I showed them how to develop a dictionary. After that, we reached out to team members from the various disciplines—such as engineering, manufacturing, and quality—asking them what keywords or phrases they cared about that they would like highlighted in these documents. Collaborating with these groups, we came up with a list of terms. Some terms have asterisks next to them, which means they’re wildcard terms. This helps avoid the need to list every variation of a word, for example, “report,” “reporting,” “reported,” etc., making it easier to streamline the process. What we’re essentially creating is a data search to identify terms relevant to each department. The process to convert this information into the format required by VT Docs is very straightforward. For example, we assign “Program Management” as a category and use a list of terms relevant to that category. We then save it as a CSV file and upload it into VT Docs. VT Docs is a browser-based system, and we have folders where we do our work and the dictionaries tab where we create our dictionaries. We import the terms from the text file, and our dictionary is now populated with the categories and relevant terms. We can now apply the dictionary to the documents. Every document in VisibleThread must be stored in a folder, and we create a folder for our example today. We uploaded a large RFP and a functional amendment, and we apply the dictionary we created to analyze the documents. This initial dictionary allows us to look at the RFP and its relevant terms by scanning it against each of the search terms from our dictionary, then creating a compliance matrix to show what requirements are in the document. We use the macro developed for DRS to customize the output of the matrix. Running the macro, it creates a template similar to what DRS needs, allowing us to designate responsibilities, verification methods, and categorize all the requirements. The final summary tab provides a dashboard view of all the key elements, showing compliance and allowing easy identification of exceptions or clarifications. Jim, could you elaborate on how these steps helped streamline your process? Certainly. The instruction tab, for example, provides a standardized workflow for parsing through various requirements, which can often span multiple documents and involve multiple team members. This helps ensure we have a serial way of going about the review process, ensuring everything comes in properly. We also have the ability to designate responsibilities either by function or individual, ensuring all requirements are covered. The next steps include categorizing requirements, identifying compliance levels, and summarizing the results in a summary page. This helps ensure all bases are covered and requirements are met in a consistent way, allowing for clear communication internally and with the customer. David demonstrated how we can also summarize compliance using pie charts and quantifiable metrics, which provides confidence both internally and externally that all requirements have been thoroughly reviewed. Paul, would you like to share an example of how you used this process uniquely? Certainly. In my role, I help standardize engineering processes across several sites. We used VT Docs to shred a corporate policy document that outlines the product development lifecycle, and we applied the macro in a unique way. Instead of assigning responsibilities by function, we categorized them by lifecycle phase. We then assessed compliance in different ways, identifying phases where requirements were being introduced and repurposing the compliance terms. This provided us with a visual representation of compliance—showing how well our procedures align with corporate requirements and identifying areas where we needed further actions. In closing, the collaboration between VisibleThread and Leonardo DRS has been a game-changer for us. It’s saved us a lot of time and effort, automated much of the manual process, and allowed us to focus more on the actual requirements rather than managing spreadsheets. Claire, I will hand it back to you for any questions. Thanks, David, Paul, and Jim. That was great and really insightful. I think a lot of the questions people had were answered throughout the discussion. One question we have here is: does it take a lot of time to apply the macro? No, it doesn’t. It’s shared as an Excel macro workbook, and all you need to do is enable macros. It’s one click, and the columns are applied, and the instruction and summary tabs show up immediately. Another question for Paul and Jim: how much time do you think you saved by implementing the macro? I would say we saved a lot of time. For example, we were working on a large proposal last summer, and without the macro, we spent a significant amount of time tabulating and managing data in Excel. This macro reduced that time from days to hours, which is crucial when you have tight deadlines. If anyone else has questions, please leave them in the survey at the end of the webinar. You can learn more about VisibleThread at visiblethread.com/vtdocs, and feel free to contact us at support@visiblethread.com. Thank you again, Paul, Jim, and David, for joining us today. We’ll see you all soon.