C-5 team pushes planes to war fighters faster

By Damian Housman

The Warner Robins Air Logistic Center made Air Force history Feb 3 when a C-5B Galaxy aircraft left programmed depot maintenance after a record-low 159 days.

Aircraft 87040 left for Travis Air Force Base, Calif., breaking the previous maintenance record of 171 days here. Last year, the same process took 200-plus days.

The C-5 arrived at Robins Aug. 22, and maintenance crews immediately began preparing the aircraft for the task ahead.

“This aircraft represents a total team effort,” said Christine Ellis, whose metal bond team worked on the C-5. “Our team fixes metal panels in place, reducing the number of panels that have to come off for repair. Communication and team integrity are vital, since we share equipment, time and space,” added Ms. Ellis.

Functional Test ran the engines, trimmed them, and made the aircraft safe for flight. Once they completed their work, including a preflight inspection, 339th Flight Test Squadron pilots took it up for a check flight. Discrepancies discovered during the flight were fixed. Then the paint shop did touch up, and the aircraft was released. Roy Rudd, C-5 functional test team leader said the process, which normally takes 10 days, was completed in five!

“The C-5 is a challenge because of its size,” he said. “This time, we had the advantage of Concerto. Concerto is project management software which gives a visual depiction of the aircraft, tasks and status. The lists of tasks are colour coded as to urgency, alerting us to the most important things to do.”

Critical Chain Project Management is a management tool which analyzes processes, and allows for using resources in the most expeditious way possible. The adoption of CCPM has allowed further reduction in flow days.

“We had a Lean even about three years ago, but we still didn’t meet our schedule,” said Duane Price, C-5 side engine cowling shop supervisor. Normally, engine cowlings are sent to his shop for repair, and rebuilt.

“About a third of the cowling is a bonded item, and not repaired by us,” he said. “Getting those items back in time was a problem.”

Last March another Lean event was held, and this time it was found to be easier to manufacture than repair those items.

“Now we know we will have all the parts here when we need them,” said Mr. Price. “We pushed back the layers of the repair process and created something we can measure against.”

The shop now produces 22 cowlings per month, and has greatly reduced back orders. The changes happened just in time to have an impact on aircraft 87040.

“It’s not just management techniques and computers that get the job done, it’s those Middle fighters,” said David Mann, C-5 Production section chief. “It’s the people. They get the job done, and they deserve all the credit.”

According to Mr. Mann, the 160-day flow rate will be maintained for both C-5A and C-5B aircraft, despite the older A-model requiring 52,000 manhours for completion, compared to the 34,000 manhours needed for the C-5B. The B-model was produced in the 1980s.

Maintaining this accelerated pace, according to Mr. Mann, rests on a combination of CCPM and Lean.

“We have reduced our work in progress from 12 to seven jets, which allows us to use the same number of technicians to work fewer C-5s simultaneously,” Mann said. CCPM and Lean have provided us the tools to work more efficiently and increase our flexibility in completing projects.”

Another C-5, an A-model, will leave Robins in the near future.

This is the only scientific double-blind study of its kind performed “in the wild”, i.e. in actual business plants. The authors summarize the results of over 100 improvement projects, where:

• 11 plants applied Six Sigma
• 4 plants applied Lean
• 6 plants applied TOC, Lean and Six Sigma

The results are unequivocal:

A little further analysis shows:

If we assume linearity (i.e. that the treatments are additive), we can estimate TOC alone. The 11 six sigma plants saved 0.63% per plant, and the 4 Lean plants saved 1.5% per plant. So, we subtract 6x(.63+1.5) = 13% for the 6 plants that did the combined, the estimated TOC alone savings is 76%, or ~13 % per plant. So, TOC is twenty times more effective than six sigma, and around nine times more effective than lean.

Lean Project Management (LPM), API’s extension of CCPM, takes the same approach as the workers in these plants: combining the synergistic effects of the three improvement approaches. The combination caused savings of 14% (of the total saved) per plant, or 24 times more effective that six sigma alone, and ten times Lean alone.

Pirasteh, R. and Farah, K. (2006). Continuous Improvement Trio: The top elements of TOC, lean, and six sigma make beautiful music together. APICS magazine, May, 2006 pp. 31-36

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement

The Goal was written 25 years ago, yet it is still a best seller worldwide. It is estimated that 20% of business people have read it, more than any other business book.

Over 5% of businesses worldwide have implemented some of the common sense methods described in The Goal with significant results:

• 70% reduction in lead time
• 65% decrease in cycle time
• 44% improvement in due-date performance
• 49% deduction in inventory
• 63% increase in revenue

The World of the Theory of Constraints: A Review of the International Literature (The St. Lucie Press/Apics Series on Constraints Management)

The Goal, there’s this Herbie boy, who is the constraint for the Boy Scout troop, was slowing down the whole team’s hike.

The hike was taking much longer time than expected. The only way the troop  could finish the hike sooner was to find a way to make Herbie go faster.

Finally, the troop put Herbie at the front of the line, distributed the contents of his backpack, and finished the hike at a much faster rate.

Of course, the hike was an analogy for improving a business, and made the point that is always someone or something is restricting the business from achieving more of its goal.

For a business, that goal is usually “to make more money now and in the future”. If your business is not making an infinite amount of net profit, someone
or something is holding you back!

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