L-3 Communication (New York) manufactures secure communications and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems for government agencies like the U.S. departments of Defense and Homeland Security. Because of the specialized nature its business, the company's L-3 Communication West facility in Salt Lake City creates up to two dozen new products each year. This, in turn, can cause production headaches because of communication problems between manufacturing engineers and suppliers, design engineers and end users in the field.
According to L-3 Communication West vice president of Operations, Larry Dietzler, designer engineers would create a new piece of equipment and put it "over the wall" to the company's 200,000-square-foot production floor. If they didn't hear anything back, they would assume everything was OK. However, more often than not, there would be difficulties in a design's manufacturability, and production would send a set of marked-up paper drawings "back over the wall" to engineering. The two departments communicated in this manner, not just because they were physically separated, but because design work is all done in CAD, while production worked directly with paper drawings.