Lean manufacturing gives the aircraft giant a big lift and a new outlook on life

by Paul V. Arnold

Maybe it’s the grunge music. Maybe it’s the salmon. Maybe it’s all that Starbucks coffee.

If you didn’t know better, you’d think the managers at Boeing’s Commercial Aircraft manufacturing plants in the Seattle area had gone completely off the deep end.

Lenny Brown wants to see craters on the plant floor of his machine fabrication facility. He also likes attaching wheels to everything.

Ralph Van Hee hopes the monolithic production machinery at his structural fabrication facility is sold to a competitor. 

Ray Healy wants his interiors facility to sell components to companies that make cruise ships and tour buses.

Mary Dowell has employees at the 737 factory doing final assembly on a plane attached to a sled that’s dragged by magnets in the floor.

These and other Boeing managers create moonshine shops, chit-chat about chaku-chaku and focus on the importance of $1.65.

They also spur employees to:
• unleash tens of thousands of square feet of floor space for new business production and eliminate hundreds of thousands of square feet of inventory space;
• cut up to 95 percent of the time it takes to produce individual parts and components;
• cut in half the time it takes to fully assemble an airplane;
• and, deliver millions of dollars in cost savings to the bottom line.

This is Boeing’s vision of industrial nirvana. It’s the Seattle version of lean manufacturing.

The big ‘but’
What’s lean manufacturing?

Boeing’s Web site defines it as "a grass roots revolt against waste."

Revolution? Waste? Boeing is a Fortune 50 fixture, the No. 1 player in the commercial jet market, a company with annual revenues exceeding $50 billion.

Brown, the lean manufacturing manager at one of Boeing’s fabrication plants in Auburn, Wash., explains it’s not about big anymore. It’s about being better, smarter and, yes, smaller. It’s not about $50 billion as much as it is about $1.65.

Brown says the electricity bill for his 600,000-square-foot plant is around $1 million a month.

"So, every square foot costs $1.65 per month," he says. "Are we making the most of that space, that $1.65? Are we leveraging every single asset in this building, from the physical capital to the human capital?

"If I build one part this month, how much does it cost? Somebody has to pay for the lights. What if I built 1 million parts this month? I incrementally spread that cost, that overhead, over more units. We want to create capacity through improvements on the machines and bring more work in, but . . ."

TIME OUT. Now we’re getting to the important stuff, the reason Boeing has taken its lean journey. It’s the big "but."

Dispatching the batching
Big Boeing used to be about big production. Utilizing a stationary batch-and-queue production system at all of its enormous plants, machines churned out parts by the thousands. Bulk parts were stacked and trucked to another area of the plant, or a holding area or an outside warehouse miles away or even the parking lot, where they waited for the next production stage.

At times, the wait spanned months.

The machines were state of the art. Production workers were highly skilled. Managers were happy because they made part quotas. But the system was in total disarray. As one manager put it at the time, "This doesn’t feel like a rational system."

Boeing was drowning in inventory and work in progress.

An alarming amount of space and cash was tied up in things that didn’t add value. And, people were disconnected from the process.

The lack of communication, continuity and efficiency led to the company’s failure several years back to meet its delivery schedules. It helped Airbus, Boeing’s chief competitor, gain market share.

That’s why Boeing needs lean. That’s why it is changing. That’s why Lenny Brown added that "but." 

It all adds up
That said, let’s return. TIME IN.

"But here’s the deal," continues Brown. "I can’t just focus on the capacity of one machine. I have to know all the capacity behind that machine and in front of it. I can make a machine efficient, but if it still takes 10 months to produce a component, have I done anything? Not only do I have to cut how long it takes on that machine, but how long it takes to go through the entire production process. 

"Every day of flow is a day of inventory. If I remove a day of flow, I remove a day of inventory. As I remove inventory, I open up floor space. As I open up floor space, I can bring in more product, different machines, build my own equipment, whatever."

This is the revolution that removes the waste and makes Boeing better able to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow.

Craters are greater
Do you want the hole truth?

Massive production machines dominate the skyline inside Boeing plants in Auburn and Everett, Wash.

Multi-story, multi-ton gantry mills, boring mills and power presses. Thirty-foot-long deburring machines, 15-foot-high ovens and 20,000-gallon cleaning tanks.

They’re visually impressive. 

But just as impressive is the large crater in the floor of Brown’s plant. 

It marks the spot where a machine and its concrete foundation used to stand. The machine cost more than $1 million; the foundation $75,000. The plant recently removed the machine and dug out the foundation. They weren’t needed.

Brown and fellow lean manager Ralph Van Hee believe more craters are in the future.

"We’ll keep a big machine in an area, but instead of having two, we’ll have one. Then all this space is freed up," says Van Hee, who guides Auburn’s light structures fab plant known as Integrated AeroStructures. "I hope the big machine is sold to the competition. I really do."

Again, the thinking has changed.

Less than a decade ago, Boeing personnel would attend a machine show, get revved up and buy a $1.5 million boring mill, $800,000 coordinate measurement machine or $40,000 swaging machine.

"They’d call and say, ‘You have four coming tomorrow.’ We’d say, ‘What will we do with them? They don’t fit what we have,’" says Brown.

Machines were purchased to handle any part order, no matter the part size — large or minute.

"Everything was sized to the largest part you’d ever have, even though 80 percent of the parts were less than 12 inches," says Van Hee.

It was overkill.

"Look at the complexity. Look at the chain alone. And we’re building a part this big," says Brown, holding his hands close together. "We aren’t going to buy this type of equipment any more."

He’s serious. Brown tells the story of plant tours he gave representatives from large machine tool builders. Each visit went as follows.

Brown: "See that machine?"
Rep: "Yes, it’s one of ours."
Brown: "I’m not buying any more of those."
Rep: "What!"
Brown: "And do you see that one over there? I’m not buying any of those, either."

He then took the rep to an area where four small machines were wheeled into a U-shaped fashion.

Brown: "When you can build those, I’ll buy from you again."

A sip of moonshine
The story behind small "right-size" machines reads like the script of a 1970s Burt Reynolds movie: Success is all about a good set of wheels and a whole lot of moonshine.

In Boeing’s case, moonshine is the shop at each plant where inventions are made to supplant the need for mammoth machines.

Here, a dozen or so ultra-creative plant employees — design engineers, maintenance technicians, electricians, machinists and operators — use imagination, spare parts, metal tubing and wheels to build portable machines that are as good as or better than the mammoths.

Why is small important? Remember, 80 percent of parts are less than 12 inches.

And, portable? You can shift on the fly, plug and unplug, move a machine to any area of the plant.

What’s buildable? If you can think it, they can build it.

Case in point: A huge blanking machine (six-figure price tag) at Brown’s fabrication plant punched out small, L-shaped blanks. It spat them out in 1,000-count batches. That’s an enormous amount of inventory. Plus, any defects came in batches of 1,000.

Engineer John Ferrieri and other moonshiners created a miniature blanking machine sparked by a hydraulic motor. They also made a sanding machine, a broach-forming machine and a parts cleaner of equal size. Now, the entire process — from raw material to finished part — is completed in minutes (instead of hours or days) within a U-shaped chaku-chaku cell (one person servicing many machines by simply loading them). Each machine cost a couple thousand dollars.

"It’s so cheap, it’s easier to replace it than maintain it," says Brown. "This is throwaway technology! It changes the way we do business."

The cost, performance and flow benefits are astounding.

• A drill machine is built for 5 percent of the cost of a full-scale Ingersoll-Rand. It can hold precise tolerances for 99 percent of the parts that plant runs.

• Portable routers are built for .2 (two-tenths) percent of the cost of a large router.

• One process that took 2,000 minutes for a 100-part order (20 minutes per part per cycle because of setup, sitting and transit) now takes 100 (one minute per part).

Plants mean business
Outside firms bug Boeing plants about purchasing some of this "right-size" machinery.

The plants haven’t yet, but they’ll consider it. That’s because lean also ushered in a change in mentality. Plants that forever had been thought of as purely cost centers now have the ability to explore ways to bring revenue into the company.

"The old days of being ‘owned’ by Boeing have changed," says Brown. "Each plant sees itself as a business."

Thanks to lean, plants can now market their own non-proprietary programs and ideas. And, they can bring in new business from Boeing or an outside company.

Ray Healy, lean manager at Boeing’s Interior Responsibility Center in Everett, says its original equipment stow bin lines are getting so lean, there is now room to make aftermarket bin products.

The plant, which makes all types of interior panels and components, also isn’t ruling out opportunities outside of commercial aircraft. Healy believes it wouldn’t be a major stretch to obtain interiors manufacturing contracts from companies that build cruise ships, tour buses and passenger trains.

"Our costs have dropped significantly," he says. "We can be competitive with anyone."

Moving in the right direction
This increasingly lean Boeing can wow you with small and wow you with speed. But it can also shine with big and slow. The latter is best seen at its 737 final assembly plant in Renton, Wash.

In traditional commercial aircraft manufacturing, airplanes are assembled in a floor layout similar to a parking lot. Planes dock in angled stalls — six on the left side of the factory, six on the right. Ramps surround each plane and workers go in and out to find parts and install them. Each night, tugs or cranes move the partially finished planes into the next stall.

To eliminate the wasted people and material movement, the plant is shifting to a new strategy: assembling 737s on a moving line.

"We wanted to do something that hadn’t been done before in aerospace," says Mary Dowell, the 737 factory superintendent. "In case you hadn’t noticed, we don’t build cars here."

The idea is fascinating. An aircraft attached to a "sled" — a winch, cable and an aluminum platform created by the plant’s moonshine shop — rides a magnetic strip track imbedded in the factory floor. The sled pulls the aircraft at a rate of 2 inches per minute across the floor, moving past a series of stations where tools and parts arrive at the moment needed so workers install the proper assemblies. The setup eliminates wandering for tools and parts, as well as expensive tug pulls or crane lifts.

Workers stop the line when assembly falls behind schedule. Managers track schedule compliance by monitoring the plane’s position in relation to time markings taped to the floor.

"The plan is to see exactly where the airplane is in the assembly process at any given time," she says. "You know if you’re on schedule or not. You can’t do that with stalls."

While the 737 moving line is still in its infancy, Dowell sees big gains from the 35 "feeder lines" that bring people and assemblies to the right place, at the right time.

"We’ve seen significant quality improvements, and around a 50 percent improvement in the time it takes to do the job," she says.

Inventory is about 40 percent of what it was about two years ago, and required floor space has declined sharply. Once the system is fully clicking, total assembly of a plane will take 12 days (instead of 23 just a few years ago). This will let Dowell trim the plant’s three 737 assembly lines to two while still maintaining a production rate of 28 planes per month.

Lean saves
Dowell, Lenny Brown and others agree that lean has helped Boeing weather the storm that’s pelted manufacturing this past year. It’s an umbrella on a rainy Seattle day. 

"Lean saved our plant," says Brown. "If we still had all that inventory, those 10-month flows, we would have shut down."

Adds Dowell: "Without a doubt, we would have trouble achieving success without it."

Instead, the company is flying.

This article appeared in the February/March 2002 issue of MRO Today magazine. Copyright 2002.

back to top

back to Cover stories archives