Fire power!

The U.S. Army’s Aviation Reset maintenance program is one of three key components of its worldwide readiness plan

Huntsville, AL — The historic Redstone Arsenal sprawls over 38,000 thickly forested acres (about 60 square miles) here on the edge of Huntsville. When the United States entered the space race in 1958, our first successful satellite, Explorer I, launched from Cape Canaveral, but it was an Army project, designed and built here.

Today, Redstone is home to more than 50 international, federal and Department of Defense installations, including NASA’s Marshall Space Center; the FBI’s Hazardous Devices School (where federal agents and local police learn bomb disposal); and the first NATO facility on American soil. All told, the base employs roughly 30,000 people, including military personnel and private contractors.

Redstone is also home to AMCOM, The United States Army Aviation and Missile Life Cycle Management Command. AMCOM manages the life cycle of more than 90 of the Army’s critical weapon and defense systems, which are divided between two major Army offices; Missiles and Space, and Aviation.

The Aviation Program Executive Office manages and maintains the Army’s Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Systems and its helicopter fleet, which includes the H-60 Black Hawk, the CH-47 Chinook, the OH-58 Kiowa Warrior, and the AH-64D Longbow Apache — the world’s most lethal attack helicopter.

This includes all planned and depot (heavy) maintenance, and the Reset program, an accelerated form of equipment triage to keep aircraft operable.

Aviation Reset
“We are charged by the Department of the Army to “reset” all aircraft that have been deployed into Iraq and Afghanistan in support of these two theater conflicts,” explains Emmitt Rodriguez, project manager, Aviation Reset. “Our mission is to bring these aircraft back to Fully Mission Capable (FMC) standard using Technical Bulletins developed by our program managers.”

To execute that mission, AMCOM has a dozen-plus maintenance sites in the continental United States, Alaska, Hawaii and Europe.

“It’s important to point out here that ‘Reset’ does not mean ‘overhaul:’ we are not overhauling aircraft,” explains Mark Moe, chief, field operations division. “We are bringing them back up to FMC (Fully Mission Capable) status. Reset enhances operational availability, because today we’re flying those aircraft between four and five times the number of hours they would normally fly in a year.”

Although the Reset program has existed since the Gulf War of 1991, it has become increasingly important since the United States reentered Iraq in 2003. The U.S. armed forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and other locations around the world are seeing extended tours of duty and, as a result, their equipment, artillery, communications, ground support and aircraft are doing longer rotations, too.

Under the Army’s new Army Force Generation Model (AMFORGEN), duty rotations are set up on a three year cycle of training, readiness and deployment. The Army’s critical equipment, including aircraft, follows the same schedule.

Unlike other military units, an Army flight crew and its aircraft mate for life. When a flight crew stands down from deployment into the Reset/retrain mode, its aircraft goes into Reset, is returned to FMC status, and then returned to that same crew for further training, readiness and eventual redeployment. The faster an aircraft is turned around, the more quickly its crew can retrain and get back into the field of operations.

As such, efficient, timely, consistent maintenance is critical to the military’s ongoing combat readiness, a fact that is constantly reinforced by AMCOM’s Office of Continuous Improvement (OCI) in its efforts to drive logistics and lean tools to cut lead time and other waste from the Reset process.

Efficiency is imperative.

“In the next rotation, we’ve got 210 Black Hawks coming back,” says Sammy Burns, production manager for cargo and utility craft such as the CH-47 Chinook. “Given that each one has a TAT (Turnaround Time) of about 85 days, we have to look at each of our facilities, determine how many slots each one has, how many aircraft it can get done in a year and how we can allocate those 210 aircraft to be reset as efficiently as possible so they can go back to their units to be redeployed if needed.”

Once each aircraft is assigned a site and a place in line, the Program Managers office monitors its progress through Reset — often on a daily basis. This is necessary because unexpected damage is common — these aircraft aren’t just working hard, they’re being shot at while they do it.

When a parts availability issue arises, AMCOM officers jump into action to track down those parts, and work with OEMs or other sources to solve the issue as quickly as possible. The sooner a potential delay is discovered and reported, the sooner it can be addressed.

“We monitor the whole process,” Burns notes. “It’s a challenge — we often have to change the schedule because an aircraft has major structural damage and is going to take 10, 20 or maybe 30 days longer than we had anticipated so we’ve got to move the aircraft behind it to some other location.”

“The sites give us daily and weekly input on each aircraft, identifying depot-necessary repairs, needed modifications and part issues and we try to integrate that as much as possible.”

Getting technical
Consistency is key to maintenance efficiency, and one of the main tools AMCOM uses to drive this is the Technical Bulletin (TB), the master document of procedures and instructions for every task performed on a piece of equipment.

Technical Bulletins are a joint product of AMCOM’s maintenance specialists and equipment OEMs. The TBs contain instructions for both regularly scheduled and Reset maintenance procedures. Over time, with input from technicians in the field, the TBs evolve.

“The TB is a living document,” says Stu Gerald, consultant for the Reset Project Office. “When we find an area that needs more in-depth inspection based on its impact on operations, we write changes into that TB, and that becomes the new standard.”

But new standards don’t just bloom overnight. In the face of an ongoing war and overextended equipment and personnel, the OCI faces the same issue as every private company does: how to implement Lean practices and improvements without interrupting production. The solution the OCI has found is to initially do kaizen blitz “harvests” of low hanging fruit, leading to longer-term improvements.

Fast training; fast results
Like its private sector counterparts, for every successful CI program in the military, a “flavor-of-the-month” program has failed, often leaving workers who become suspicious at the mere mention of “continuous improvement.”

For this reason, the OCI team at AMCOM takes a “leaner” approach to Lean events. Training, which usually begins with value stream mapping, is conducted immediately prior to each event, and event team members get just training enough to effectively perform the process.

The goal is to get immediate results.

“We do a lot of quick hits — there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit out there, so we try to capitalize on that initially to get buy-in from the participants,” Johnnie Bradt, team lead, OCI, explains. “Lean Six Sigma is our main methodology and value stream mapping is our key tool, but we use others, too.

“We go in and do training in value stream mapping and what we want to accomplish with it. Then we immediately develop a map and current state map for that process site, which shows all the lead times and where all the waste is in the process. We look at that current state and say, ‘Okay, where are our opportunities for improvement here?’ ”

Hazards inherent
One hazard in this process, as it is in all multi-site operations, lies in how to spread the best practices that emerge from these events across the entire organization.

The main avenue of transmission is through the Lean event facilitators themselves. The OCI has contracted with ASI, Analytical Services, Inc., and UAH, the University of Alabama Huntsville. OCI has dedicated one full-time person from each organization to support Reset, plus three government personnel on a part-time basis. These facilitators travel to various Reset sites to launch the programs, conduct training and events, build buy-in and begin to create a Lean culture.

The revised Technical Bulletins that come from these events also spread new best practices across the organization. The OCI is also launching multi-site video teleconferences to share learnings as they emerge.

Plus, within each Reset site, news travels fast from dock to dock. When one team achieves a breakthrough goal in lead time reduction, for example, other teams typically take up the implied challenge.

A tradition of obstacles
However, the OCI also faces Lean implementation challenges that many private firms do not. While some companies in private industry must contend with labor unions, the military must contend with its own deeply ingrained hierarchies, traditional chains of command and mixes of military and contracted labor and sites. By design, the chain of command is not Lean.

But this is the military, so why doesn’t the OCI just “order” continuous improvement to happen? After the laughter dies down, the OCI team members admit this is one crux of the problem. The OCI, although comprised entirely of former military personnel, can’t “order” anyone — military or contractor — to do anything.

“The biggest institutional barrier we have in the federal government is our personnel system,” Gerald states. “If we were to go out and tell the workforce that we’re going to implement Lean and do things faster, cheaper, better and, oh, by the way, cut some jobs — bingo! We would get no cooperation at all. You’re not going to change the shape or size of the organization because the system works against it. No matter how efficient we become, the payroll will not change.”

The mighty pen
In spreading the Lean gospel, the OCI can only lead by example, provide “proof of performance” and use the single big stick it has, the pen it uses to write checks.

It’s a big stick.

“The aviation budget of this Reset program is approaching $3 billion since we began in the summer of 2003,” Gerald explains. “It’s big business, and it’s why CI and Lean are so important to us.”

AMCOM has withdrawn business in the past from maintenance providers that were not performing — a painful wake-up call for those contractors. Since then, Rodriguez notes, one of those contractors has reinvented itself.

“They have come full circle,” he says. “They’ve made such strong process improvements that they’re challenging us now to give them more work.”

“And that’s not an insignificant thing to a contractor,” Gerald adds. “We’re in a ‘Time is Money’ world here, so from a contractor’s standpoint, the less efficient he is, the more money he makes. For a contractor to embrace this and undergo such a major cultural change is very significant because the entire concept of Lean — being more efficient, taking fewer man-hours, making less money in the hope of making it up in volume — runs counter to his business model.”

It is also a lesson that is spreading through the ranks of contractors, and there are many, who serve AMCOM.

“To see that contractor’s performance go from being one of our least productive to most productive sites shows us that some of the Lean efforts we are making are now spilling over into the commercial world, rather than them bringing it to us,” Gerald adds. “So to answer the question, ‘Is the Army really serious about this stuff?,’ this is a great example of how we can show industry a better way.”

“This is also why you should always look at it as a growth strategy,” Bradt says. “Our sites have shown that as they become leaner they’re getting more business, and resources are being freed up that can be redeployed to do value-added work that was not getting done before.”

Control what you can: the supply chain
The biggest line item AMCOM deals with is spare parts, and the lead time in receiving them is the largest single issue the Reset program management team faces. Because a major delay on one aircraft can threaten chaos across the system, supply chain management is an increasingly critical, sophisticated and integrated job.

“We have 60 people here who are constantly calling contractors, getting us dates, tracking parts, talking with the OEMs, doing whatever they have to do to get that part and get it to the site so the repair can be made,” says Mike Huettel, chief, logistics management division. “Our job is to ensure that all the supply chain mechanisms are in place, that lead times and transportation time are minimized, and that all the logistics elements are integrated into the process so these guys get the right part in the right place at the right time to get that aircraft repaired.”

And that’s just the front end. On the back end, Huettel’s division also houses all the enterprise management and systems integration tools needed to ensure that data keeps flowing and the many reports it feeds are generated and dispersed in a timely manner.

Finally, the logistics division must make sure all of its Reset platform data is integrated into the new Army Force Generation Model (AMFORGEN), which dictates the eventual rotation of every element of the Army’s preparedness system.

“We are fully integrated all the way down to the unit in the field — we help to manage the life cycle of those aircraft all over the world,” Burns observes. “When we take aircraft away from a unit to go into Reset, we have to be synchronized with that unit and know its training schedules and what issues we may be creating. If an aircraft has major structural damage and will take longer to repair, its unit needs to know that because units can’t stop training to send aircraft off to repair.”

“It’s all about lead time,” Gerald says. “A time frame of 25 to 28 months is not unusual from the time it takes to identify a requirement to getting the first item delivered. And a lot of times we’re not talking about a rotarhead or an engine — we’re talking about fasteners.

“Plus, the forecasts the Army had for repairing these aircraft were based on pre-war consumption data. What happens when you increase that by a factor of four? Your forecast isn’t worth a darn anymore. This is another reason why we repair a lot of things in Reset that we normally would replace.”

Mission capable
The mission is “simple,” to increase reliability, reduce waste, cut costs, cut lead time, integrate processes and information, and drive a new Lean culture from both the top down and the bottom up — in one of the largest, most bureaucratic organizations in the world. Fortunately, the OCI has allies in Lean organizations like ASI, Analytical Services, Inc., UAH, the University of Alabama Huntsville, and champions in the ranks on the Reset shop floor.

It’s a complex, fascinating operation, one on which lives literally depend. And it’s working. AMCOM is making major strides in aircraft Reset TAT reduction and saving millions of taxpayer dollars in the process. For this part of today’s Army, the mission has never been more important.

This article appeared in the February/March 2007 issue of MRO Today magazine. Copyright 2007.

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