Meet the Boeing executive whos building a smart parts factory

By?Marissa Nall?– Reporter, Puget Sound Business Journal

Jan 4, 2024

The new second-story space at The Boeing Co.’s additive manufacturing facility in Auburn is filled with plaques of patents. Several name Melissa Orme as their inventor.

Orme has worked at all levels of the manufacturing industry, from research and development to a two-person startup. Despite taking an interest in aerospace from an early age, her route to Boeing was circuitous, taking her across the globe before landing her in Seattle.

She now leads Boeing’s efforts to create 3D-printed plastic, titanium and aluminum satellite and defense aircraft parts for Washington’s largest manufacturer.

The work is part of Boeing’s strategy to optimize parts for better range and durability, and to strengthen supply chains on critical components.

About Melissa Orme:

• Residence: Southern California (she commutes to Washington regularly)
• Family: Husband, twin sons who are graduate students pursuing Ph.D.s
• Hobbies: Traveling, painting, cycling, swimming, yoga
• Prior roles: Chief technology officer, Morf3D; professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, University of California, Irvine
• Education: University of Southern California, Ph.D. in aerospace, aeronautical and astronautical engineering; bachelor’s of science in aerospace engineering

A day in the life of Melissa Orme:

• 5 a.m.: Wake up, do 30 minutes of yoga and core exercises before breakfast and coffee
• 7 a.m.: Arrive at work. If I am with my team in Auburn, I like to clear all meetings and walk the floor.
• 10 a.m.: I’ve scheduled GUAM for 30 minutes on my calendar every day, which stands for Get Up And Move.
• 5:30 p.m.: Arrive home, swim 30 minutes or bike on my Peloton
• 6:30 p.m.: Read the news, catch up on personal email
• 7 p.m.: Practice piano: “I am teaching myself to play — hopefully I’ll keep it up”
• 7:30 p.m.: Cook dinner for me and my husband. After dinner, watch pro league soccer highlights together

What brought you to lead Boeing’s additive manufacturing team?

My father was an aerospace engineer, and I’ve always been attracted to airplanes and space. I got a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering, but my research was not what you would think of as aerospace engineering. I was an experimentalist. I proved out this technology of 3D printing metal parts by electrostatically steering droplets in space at a pretty high rate. It was 3D printing before there was 3D printing. Then I relinquished my tenured position as a full professor, and I moved to Greece with my family to explore another opportunity of medical technology. When I moved back, I was the second employee and the chief technology officer of Morf3D, a startup for additive manufacturing for components for the aerospace and defense industry. Boeing made a small investment into the company, and four years into that Greg Hyslop called me up and asked if I would lead additive at Boeing.

What’s it like being at the forefront of this additive manufacturing movement?

I feel like I’ve been at all levels of manufacturing from a very basic research point of view to the startup point of view, to the point of view now at Boeing, where we are putting it on products. It’s really exciting when something that your team made is launched into space or flown on a fighter aircraft, or a helicopter or a drone. Boeing has curated the most intelligent and creative, innovative people in the industry, from metal and polymer and research. The things that we’ve done this past year – and I’m not able to tell you all those things, as you can imagine – we’re at the forefront of innovation.

How has the facility performed against expectations in the last year?

It’s not as straightforward as a lot of people think. A lot of folks think you buy a machine, you push a button and you get a good part. There is a lot of due diligence, a lot of work that has to be done in terms of understanding machine behavior. We will always be exploring new materials. Additive manufacturing is different in the sense that you’re making a material at the same time as you’re making a part. Whenever you bring on a brand-new material system, you will need to optimize parameters to make sure that we have the highest quality material, not just the right shape. Now we’re getting parts that are as good or better than traditionally fabricated parts.

What have you learned going through that process?

We’re turning this into a smart factory. We’re connecting every single task of the value stream from the design of the part, to uploading it to a machine, to actually printing it, to going through the post-processing steps. We’re connecting the data that we generate, and each one of those steps with the digital thread. I feel like we’re a pathfinder for many larger programs in the company. We’re about 60% connected and that means data is automatically being pulled from machines. Instead of just having this big pile of data, the benefit is that we can take data from different aspects of the value stream and previous data, and we can create machine learning models. We can actually do predictive quality control — we can understand when something will happen, why it will happen and what we should do about it.

What else is new in the coming year?

We have one part that we’re doing as a spare for (Boeing Commercial Airplanes). When you know a supplier has a hard time meeting their targets, we can help the production line stay healthy. Starting in the first quarter of 2024, we will be producing metal parts for commercial airplanes. This has been a long time coming, but the (Federal Aviation Administration) has stringent requirements. We are going through all the processes, hand in hand with the FAA to make sure everybody’s happy.

What sets your parts manufacturing approach apart?

This is different than a lot of other industries. They’ll say, “How many parts are you making?” That’s the wrong question. I can be making 50,000 irrelevant little brackets, and that doesn’t add value for the airplane. The right question is, how many parts am I eliminating because I can consolidate many parts together? We have some examples where we’re reducing the part count by 90%. Imagine now, the efficiency in assembly, the logistics of warehousing, purchasing and sourcing — and that’s sustainability.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ANTHONY BOLANTE | PSBJ

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