Pratt & Whitney Launching Into New Era

Well known as the birthplace of the space shuttle engines, Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne in Canoga Park enters a transitional phase as its most famous program ends its run and space considerations call for consolidation. Heading up the Valley operations is Ron Ramos, a 30-year Pratt & Whitney employee who became general manager of the Canoga Park campus in September after having been director of Expendable Propulsion Programs. More than just rocket engines come from the two Pratt & Whitney facilities making up the campus. The company also receives contracts to support the Defense Department’s Missile Defense Agency. “We support some of the energy stuff going on on the power side of the business,” Ramos said. Energy projects may play a larger role at Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne as will the Ares rockets that replace the space shuttle when that program ends next year. Recognizing the importance of the shuttle program to the company, when NASA gets ready to dispose of the engines Ramos would like to see them return to the Valley. “If and when that occurs we are interested in one or more of them,” Ramos said. Question: Are there any changes that Pratt & Whitney/Rocketdyne faces with a new presidential administration taking office? Answer: We are heavily involved in space and everything we see from (President Barack) Obama and his transition team and his new administration seems positive for space. I saw that at one point there was a billion something for NASA in the new stimulus bill that was approved. That’s a positive. Obama made a decision early on that he was a big supporter of space, which is a good thing for us. We are optimistic, both his support of his space and areas that he is showing interest in we believe there are opportunities for us to get involved in those. Q: What other areas are those? A: He’s very big on energy; new sources of energy, renewable energy. That is in line with where we are trying to grow the business to some extent. We do a lot of high tech stuff here but high tech stuff can be used in more areas than liquid rocket engines and space products. We are already getting involved in some ventures with some energy companies that have experience in that area. We have technology to offer them that can improve their business. We can take advantage of that and grow into some non-traditional markets that we haven’t really ventured into that much. Q: The shuttle program is scheduled to end in 2010. What impact will that have on operations here? A: The target is late 2010. There have been a lot of discussions about the potential of extension. As of now our baseline is through the end of 2010 and that is what we are working toward until NASA tells us other wise. Q: And then it’s the Ares rocket that replaces the shuttle? A: The first one to come along is the Ares One, which is the manned version. Overlapping with that is the Ares Five, which is the cargo version. We are involved heavily on both of those. We are working on them already. We have the J2X engine, which is derivative of the J2 engine used on the Apollo program. We are in the midst of design and development work on that. We’ve got a good overlap. The shuttle transitioning away while that is a significant amount of business for us we’ve already overlapped that with some development and design work we are doing. So once 2010 comes along it’s not like we will see this big cliff of a thousand jobs going away. Q: What is the mix between manufacturing positions and the R & D-type; jobs here? A: We are heavily technical based. So out of the 2,100 employees here we have roughly 250, or 10 percent, would be hands on, manufacturing workforce out in the factory. Everything else would be supportive of that in some shape or fashion. Of that 2,100 people here there are about 1,000 that are engineers. That would be true of most of our sites, approximately 40 percent to 50 percent of our workforce is engineers and that is about the same ratio we have here. The rest of the folks would be manufacturing support, quality, business management, and communications. Q: How is Pratt & Whitney preparing for the loss of its engineering staff due to retirements? A: We started earlier than most of the rest of industry. We’ve been seriously into knowledge management probably for a decade. The worst thing that can happen is you learn a lot of stuff, you have a lot of people doing work but you don’t capture it to the point where the next program comes along, the next generation of people comes along and you don’t want them to make the same mistakes. There is nothing perfect in the industry but you want to learn from your mistakes and make sure you don’t make them again. There has been a big push in capturing all of our lessons learned, capturing all of our knowledge, making sure we are mentoring the younger people with the more experienced people. A lot of knowledge goes out the door every time someone retires but we’re trying very hard to make sure that knowledge is infused in others before that happens. Q: What has the company been doing to get younger people interested in science and math and pursuing careers that use both? A: We’re very interactive with a lot of universities not just here in California but all across the country. We have a significant summer internship program. There are two paths to that. One is through the Inroads program, which is something (parent company United Technologies) is very supportive of. The interns from heavily diverse schools come through that. But we are also heavily involved in summer internships in general and we bring in dozens and dozens of summer interns, expose them to the business, let them see what we do and we get to see what they do. They get multiple opportunities to come back here. We get a lot of support for all those programs. Q: What about at the middle school and high school levels. A: We have a program called Discover “E”, with the E standing for engineering. We have employees that volunteer their time to go out to high schools, middle schools, and most significantly elementary schools to get kids more interested in math and science. By college they already know what they are going to do. High school is sometimes even too late because if they have blown off math and science through elementary and middle school they are not going to catch back on in high school. We really do a lot of targeting toward elementary and middle schools. The other two things we do relative to that is we have a big science fair we host here every year. We set up exhibits and displays and the kids go through; they spend an hour or two going through to see what we do, a lot of hands-on experiments. For some of those schools once a year we bring the teachers in and go through at a higher level some hands-on math and science activities to help them learn more about how to teach science in the elementary and middle schools level. Q: What is the future of the facilities here in the Valley? A: Our ultimate goal is some consolidation. We are a little over-capacity right now. We’ve been working for a while on a plan that ultimately consolidates all our activities up at the DeSoto campus. A lot of that is tied to the shuttle program ending and a lot of the activities that are based from a factory manufacturing standpoint at this campus are tied to the space shuttle management program. We have leaned out our factory processes and we’ve already consolidated most of the factory up to the DeSoto campus. We’re at about 2,100 employees between the two campuses and we can fit those and all the activities we have going on relatively comfortably at the DeSoto campus. Q: Any timeline on when that will be done? A: The plan isn’t finalized and firmed up yet. We’re targeting maybe a four or five year timeframe. A lot of that has to do with the ability of funding to do it, the affordability of the project, and how quick or slow we may want to go doing it. Spotlight: Ron Ramos Title: General Manager, California Operations Age: 52 Education: BS Civil Engineering, University of California, Davis; MS Applied Mechanics, California State University, Northridge Personal: Married with four children, ages 18 thru 22 Career Turning Point: Identified for first management role in area outside my expertise, resulted in added breadth and a career path that hadn’t existed before Most Admired Person: My father