◆ Management needed to be educated in the process and stop the
practice of bringing in additional aircraft whenever one arrived.
They needed to control the work in process limiting aircraft to the
number of stations in the flow lines (discussed later).
The work areas were laid out into workstations. There was a technical
challenge in moving the plane from station to station. At some point the
plane was taken apart and the center barrel and wings were removed,
along with the wheels. The F18 was a new aircraft for the base, and
they were able to purchase a system that held the plane together on
a big fixture on wheels so it could be moved from position to position.
This was not the case with the P3, so in its case a decision was made
to use a “virtual flow line.” That is, teams of repair persons would come
to each aircraft at fixed intervals of time to perform a stage of work.
This meant they would have to bring in the tools and materials needed
for each phase of the process.
Kaizen workshops were used to set up each piece of the overall system.
There were 5S workshops to lay out the area, find places for everything,
and label standard positions. There were material flow workshops to
take parts off the plane and put them into “shadow boxes” or kits, so
when they were brought back for reassembly they were organized.
Hazardous materials were set out on carts in kits. All the kits and parts
and materials were set up on pull systems to be replenished as they were
utilized. The slow and complex process of analyzing each procedure in
detail to develop standardized work was started so that each station
could be aligned with the takt time.
The P3 is an older plane soon to be retired. The Navy decided to reduce
the available planes in the fleet by over 50, from 200 to 150, yet wanted
a constant number in the field (about 120). This required less time tied
up in maintenance to keep the planes needed in the fleet available. Due
to some fuel tank and structural integrity problems associated with
aging, additional stress testing and repair requirements were added,
increasing the pressure—doing more in less time. In short, from the
Navy’s perspective this was a crisis, and from a lean perspective an
ideal opportunity to show the value of waste elimination.
Repairing these aircraft prior to the additional testing and repair
requirements took 247 calendar days. To meet the 120 planes needed
in the field at all times required a reduction in turnaround to 173 days,
a 30 percent improvement.
In April 2004 the lean activities formally started under the direction of
an experienced lean consultant.^1 After value stream mapping andChapter 5. Create Connected Process Flow 87(^1) The consultant was Ed Kemmerling, who was later joined by Sam Talerico, both with many
years of experience applying lean methods at Ford Motor Company.