A New Book
On Lean Manufacturing
From Manufacturing &
Technology News
At Warner Robins AFB
During the 1990s, the Department of Defense and the Clinton administration relentlessly preached to Congress and the American public that the military was undertaking a "revolution in business affairs." The idea was to free up tens of billions of dollars from its inefficient operations and spend the savings on modernizing its aging weapons systems and buying a new generation of hardware.
It didn't work. Try as it might, the military was incapable of transforming itself, and instead started lobbying for budget increases. Congress concurred and its budget started to go up, up, up, from $250 billion only six years ago to perhaps more than $350 billion in 2002.
During those years of retrenchment and hope, no one considered instilling the concept of lean management as practiced by Toyota Motor Corp. within the military's industrial complex.
However, a nascent but fast-growing lean manufacturing program has begun at the Warner Robins Air Force Base, which is the lead facility for refurbishing many of the Air Force's major aircraft.
Early successes with lean at Warner Robins point to what could become massive savings if lean is implemented throughout the military's hundreds of industrial sites. The commander of the facility, which has more than 19,800 employees and is the largest industrial complex in the state of Georgia, fully supports the lean way of thinking.
Maj. General Dennis Haines, described by some lean practitioners as being the leading lean luminary in the federal government, knows the lean lingo, from flow, to cellular manufacturing to takt time. He holds a lean breakfast with the leadership of each of his base's directorates every Friday morning at 6:30 a.m. He has participated in kaizen continuous improvement events on the factory floor, daily recap sessions and Friday report-outs. He has gotten to know firsthand the problems and constraints faced by workers and supervisors wrestling with the constant burden of government paperwork and bureaucracy.
Lean has an inherent aversion for rules and regulations and Haines has found that many such restrictions are unnecessary to improving the value streams of the hundreds of products moving through the four-million-square feet of maintenance shops at Warner Robins. The facility, on 8,722 acres in middle Georgia, is tasked with keeping Air Force planes flying, including worldwide logistics support for the F-15, C-5, C-130, the U-2, all Air Force helicopters and missiles. It also refurbishes all types of avionics and aircraft systems.
Due to budgetary constraints and the unwillingness of Congress to fund new aircraft initiatives, a great deal of pressure has been placed on Warner Robins to keep aircraft flying long beyond their conceived lifespan. Each plane that comes in to be refurbished presents a Pandora's Box of problems and the Air Force can't turn to vendors who no longer exist to produce replacement equipment. Organic engineering, reverse engineering and manufacturing of parts is a big and expensive part of the base's operations. Lean has the potential to reduce a lot of the headaches involved in addressing these difficult issues.
Lean operations have been introduced initially in the F-15 wing shop and the savings last year alone were a reported $8 million. The concept is now being fanned out to other areas, including avionics.
Beyond Warner Robins, the Air Force Materiel Command is studying lean as a business system, as are other Air Force logistics centers, with the encouragement and funding dollars from the Air Force Manufacturing Technology Directorate at the Air Force Research Laboratory in Ohio.
Maj. Gen. Haines spoke with Manufacturing News editor Richard McCormack about the lean transformation taking place within his operations and the importance of leadership. Here's what he had to say:
Question: Do you see a strong future for lean in the military's industrial complex?
Haines: I think so. I like the lean thought process. I like the way it forces you to examine what you're doing to identify what you're really about, the end product you're producing and the essential steps to produce it.
Q: What propelled Warner Robins into considering adopting a lean approach to its operations?
Haines: For us, our first thrust has been in manufacturing and repair because that is where we had the biggest need for a catharsis. We had far too much of what we were producing coming out late and with costs increasing. Increasingly, our customer -- the Air Force -- was looking at us wondering whether we really knew what kind of business we were in and whether we could do that business. Even though we felt we were competitive with the other people in the business, it was pretty much apparent to us that we needed to change.
Q: How long have you personally been involved in the lean way of thinking?
Haines: I've become familiar with lean only in the last couple of years and have seen the power of it. We had lean prototype programs going here for the past year and a half at the wing shop and one in the avionics area. The wing shop was getting good management support. But in terms of senior-level involvement, there was literally none for the first six months -- we simply weren't aware of what was going on.
I became aware of what was going on about a year ago and I really got into learning what lean was about and then we had our first executive leadership workshop.
Q: Is that knowledge beginning to percolate into the management ranks at Warner Robins?
Haines: Absolutely, dramatically. We're getting a lot of movement and a lot of enthusiasm. We are fortunate in that we have some good benchmarks within the organization now so we can show people the befores and the afters and the dramatic changes as a result of implementing lean.
Q: What are some of your success stories?
Haines: The F-15 wing constitutes almost half of the man-hours and the cost of an F-15 depot maintenance program because it has to be literally completely rebuilt. The scheduled time to do that in order to meet the airplane flow is 37 days. A year and a half ago when we started with lean, we were on a seven-day-a-week, three-shift operation and still could not meet the production-line requirement.
So the Air Force's F-15 system program manager who runs the whole worldwide support system was looking for a second source for F-15 wings with the idea of starting them up and if they did better work than us, they would move a lot of it to that organic facility.
Today, we're doing the same number of wings in the 37 days, but we're doing it in a five-day, two-shift operation -- 16 hours a day. We've moved 25 people out of that production area to other areas where we needed them. We reduced our overtime expense by $1.5 million; we saved another $1.5 million by the people we moved out of the area; and surprisingly enough when we went to the cellular, one-piece flow, we went from individual toolkits and multiple pieces of special equipment, to equipment specialized for that particular portion of the flow and we saved $1.2 million in tools.
Q: The potential applications must be vast at Warner Robins, given the 14 million square feet of industrial space there.
Haines: My view is that in every area that we measure in production we will have the same kind of results. In the first cut, we will average 30 percent reduction in costs and a 30 percent reduction in flow days, and it's proven true with every one we've done so far.
Q: How hard will that be to achieve base-wide? How long will it take?
Haines: It will take some time to get through the entire process because it's very focused, very intensive. We have a weekly senior-level meeting on lean just to keep our focus on it and to talk about how fast can we move through it. We started with essentially one team in each major production area and are building on that core. We have a lean event and then through the successes like we had in the wing shop, where people have gone through the process and have learned how to do that process, we use a portion of that savings as our seed corn. From those 25 people who worked it through the wing shop, we picked three to run new teams.
In the product directorate where the F-15 wing work is done, which we call Technology and Industrial Support, I have seven teams running in a production unit of 2,500 people. But there are 150 separate shops, each of which has multiple processes. It will take a couple of years to do it the first time in each of those shops and do it right. And then you're ready to go through it again.
Q: Where else have you expanded the effort?
Haines: One other team has just finished in C-5 floorboards area. We did a lean event and we increased the throughput by 40 percent and decreased material costs by 30 percent.
Q: Are there any intangible benefits to the lean approach to your operations?
Haines: We had lost a lot of the real in-depth communication between the employees and the supervisors. Lean forces the supervisors, the workforce and the support people on a team to all start working things as a team and thinking of themselves as a team. Our people who work the process know what to do and they know where the good ideas are, we just have to tap that. One of the real secrets of lean is it opens that communication.
The second is the ability to go into a process with a clean-sheet approach with no constraints. I'm going to build a process that works and then we'll worry about changing the rules, regulations and policy to support a process that works. When you do that, all kinds of internal constraints that you've built in for what at the time seemed to be good reasons become counter productive. When you look at this as a one-piece flow -- as a value stream -- these constraints become counter productive.
You start identifying all of those internal hurdles that senior management can simply change. People think that they are rules constrained, but when we look at it, about 80 percent of all those constraints we can do away with ourselves. There are about 20 percent that we have to go to somebody else and educate and try to change, but the vast majority we find we can fix.
Q: How many of rule changes require an act of Congress?
Haines: There are very few that are law. There are a few more that are OSD policy or Air Force policy, but most of them are our policy and our procedures. That is enlightening to a lot of folks when we go through the first time because they think, "Well, we can't change those," and we find that we can.
The third piece is that when you really make changes happen quickly, it gets the workforce's attention, and they know that the management is supportive, interested and involved. When you do those three things, magic happens.
Q: It must make coming to work more interesting and fun.
Haines: I just came out of one of our meetings and that is exactly the sentiment that is coming out of my production chiefs. They are now going down there and even if it's not a lean event, they're walking value streams themselves, saying this process isn't working, so let me just walk each of the steps through. It's kind of like the flat forehead where you keep hitting yourself in the forehead: Why am I doing that? Why am I doing that?
Q: Can an organization like yours initiate a lean implementation on its own or do you need help doing it?
Haines: You need help doing it and we have one of the best, we're using Simpler Consultants. This was one of our learning experiences, too. One of our hiccups early on was we didn't have the strongest consultants on our effort and so as we became smarter and more insistent, we put a first team on it. Our objective is to let them teach us for a year or so and by then we should have our own people who are ready to start running with it internally.
Q: How did you personally come to your enlightened state?
Haines: I was exposed a little bit to it when I was the Air Force Materiel Command director of logistics. At the time, the book "The Machine That Changed the World" came out and I read it. I was embroiled in things that we thought would improve our efficiency. At the time we were working on the Depot Repair Enhancement Program and Contract Repair Enhancement. Both focused on improving the production and the support to production and supply chain management. So I've been working that issue for a long time, but I didn't really get excited about implementing lean itself until I got here and I became aware of the project we were doing.
George Koenigsaecker [former CEO of The HON Co.] came down here for a two-day seminar and this was the catharsis. Here is one of the leading guys in lean in the United States and he came down here and shared two days with us and because of the low level that lean was being worked here, I really didn't know what was going on. I found out about it at the last minute. Our senior staff didn't really know that his seminar was designed for us. We just had the wrong people working it.
I sat through a portion of that because I had conflicts and I hadn't even cleared my schedule for two days. So we missed an opportunity. I asked George to come back and we had another two-day session. Prior to that two-day session, we all read "Lean Thinking" by Womack and we sat down for two days with George, and I was on fire. I was on fire after reading the book and saying yes, this is the way I approach my thinking. I think it will work for us, let's go try.
Q: Was it easy to see the connections between a Wiremold type of industrial case study and your processes?
Haines: We think of ourselves as having this unique problem in the repair business in that nothing is repeatable, but when you look at what we do it's very repeatable. There are some surprises, but a lot of the surprises come by our not examining what we were doing and not planning well enough. Lean has forced us to do that. We're starting to tackle some of the really tough areas now and so I'm excited. It will fundamentally change our performance.
Q: Is lean becoming institutionalized at Warner Robins?
Haines: Quickly. It is not institutionalized at every level in every activity, but I have enough of the senior management staff who are truly getting excited about this so I think it will last when I'm gone.
Q: How about the traditional cultural change that is required?
Haines: There is a long way to go, a long way to go. Those areas that are in it and are using it, they're believers. But I'll tell you though, you can always have setbacks, even in the areas that are the most mature. We just went through a period in our wing shop where the F-15s were pushing up their production so we had to shorten our flow days and instead of really sitting back and figuring out we've got to change our takt time, what does that mean for each piece, we fell back to throwing overtime and throwing people at it. They got out of sync and guess what? Our efficiency of operation went way down. So we said, oops, we did that wrong, let's get back to basics. We went back to the one-piece flow and now we're back on track. So even in the mature shops you have to watch the fact that the old habits die hard.
Q: You just mentioned takt time and I wonder what percentage of CEOs of manufacturing companies -- much less the leaders in military industrial organizations -- know the meaning of the term.
Haines: I think few in the military organizations at this time. Even at our center, it might be 20 percent. The senior leadership all does and we're now massively deploying it with massive training. What we're trying to avoid is building a lot of up-front costs, so a lot of our training in this is just in time: you train and then you go into an event. The training is recent and you reinforce it by experience. I've been involved too many times where we go in and give everybody four days of training and then they didn't use it for a year and it is forgotten and we just wasted it.
Q: How has lean changed your own individual job?
Haines: Let me say I have not made as much of a catharsis as I know I need to make and I would like because I'm fighting schedule every day. But what I am finding is that I'm taking my schedule almost once a week and building white space into it where I can go down and visit a lean activity, participate at least a little bit in a lean shop.
I made a commitment this morning that within three weeks I'll have my secretary say he's not here and actually do my first full-up lean event. Now I probably should have done it six months ago. We're making the same commitment among all of our senior leadership here, where we will do at least one lean event ourselves a quarter. They will participate in their lines plus one a quarter outside.
The area that we have missed so far is getting the second-line supervisors involved in a lean event. Thus far, they've been taking the lean briefings, they'll take the end-of-day briefing and the final lean team briefing, but there is a difference between being informed and having ownership. So we're getting them involved more in actually doing the lean events. Organizationally, we're at the beginning of a transformation into being a really lean oriented organization.
Q: How shocking will it be for those people working that line to see you down there with them?
Haines: They won't believe it, but they are getting used to seeing a general on the line since I've been here. When I got here nearly two years ago and walked down on the line the first time, especially when I walked in without an entourage of people with me, it was a shock to them. But they're used to it now.
Q: That's what leadership is all about.
Haines: Every time I go on the line I learn something and I find that something is not exactly like I had expected. Sometimes it's really heartening because it's something really good going on, more often than not it's an area where if I can help resolve a constraint when something is going not as I thought it was going.
Q: When you're doing your week-long lean event, will you be outfitted like the major general or someone who is working the line?
Haines: When I participate in a lean event, they're going to know who I am so I might as well wear the uniform, but I will be quite aware of the fact that I can easily dominate a forum like that just because of the position; so at least my initial view is that I'll be more in the role of a facilitator and encourager in that process and let them do the talking.
Q: Does it make it more difficult to have success when someone of your stature is down on the floor with the line workers? Do they hesitate and wonder about what they should say and what it is they're doing?
Haines: There is initially some discomfort but that goes away within the first couple of hours. They forget you're wearing the rank in terms of their being open and feeling at ease at making comments. The more senior you get, the more important it becomes how you go into the group and how you present yourself. If you go in and do a lot of talking and dominate it, you'll probably inhibit the process.
Q: Do the workers try to hide their blemishes, thinking, "Oh boy, this process isn't very good and we've worked it for 20 years so we better try to make it look better than what it is."
Haines: I don't think so.
Q: Does the old command-and-control military mentality make it hard for you to get management to work together with workers.
Haines: I don't know that lean attacks that particularly. One of the things that we find that is an inhibitor in the process is trust. To really get lean, you have take some of those constraints off and trust the person doing it to have made the right decision.
There is another part of lean that helps you do that. If you build lean right, in terms of one-piece flow, the constraints and the problems are going to be elevated so quickly to you that it doesn't have time to really get out of bounds and out of control before it's up to senior management. That is a good thing because right now in a normal process, you can be so far behind you can't recover before a senior manager finds out.
Q: What can other managers in government industrial operations learn from your experience?
Haines: You just have to dig in and do it yourself. You have to go see other people who are doing it and the light bulbs will come on.
Q: It's interesting how we're talking about a mode of operation that is called "lean." The benefits are real, but the term "lean" doesn't seem to fit the process. Toyota doesn't even call it lean. They call it the Toyota Production System.
Haines: From the Air Force standpoint it's unfortunate that it carries that moniker. I've been looking for another name because we started with lean logistics in 1995 and we leaned everything before we fixed the processes. We really hurt our readiness.
So when people talk lean, the paradigm of that goes back to those old things and this lean is not that lean. This lean is really fix the process, resource the value-added process and eliminate the non-value-added processes.
People think it's just another way to cut costs or lay off workers, but it's much bigger than that. If someone could come up with a descriptive name other than lean it would be helpful.