Resetting the clock

Value stream mapping, 5-S and visual tools help slash aircraft Reset turnaround time

by Tom Hammel

FORT LEWIS, WASHINGTON — Those old Army recruiting ads claiming that military service prepares people for future careers turned out to be truer than many people thought. For quite a few veterans, their first careers in the military were the perfect training ground for their second — as contractors serving the military.

Just ask Dale Parker. Over the course of a 21-year military career Dale served the Army, many of them here at Fort Lewis doing maintenance on helicopters including the CH-47 Chinook and the UH-60 Black Hawk. Now retired from the military, he still serves the Army, as an employee of AMCOM, the Aviation and Missile Command, and he still works here at Fort Lewis, maintaining and repairing Chinooks and Black Hawks.

As such he is the right man in the right place to contrast the Army’s old way of doing aircraft maintenance with AMCOM’s new, leaner methods of doing the same work. In terms of eliminating waste and trimming TAT (Turnaround Time) on maintenance projects, AMCOM looks to Fort Lewis and workers like Dale to set the bar for others to follow.

Operation: Reset
The Reset program was born during the first Gulf War in 1991, when aircraft needed to be serviced and repaired as quickly as possible to get them back online in the field of operations. The sports equivalent is pulling an injured player off the field, plucking the turf out of his helmet, giving him oxygen, a cortisone shot and a fresh ACE bandage and sending him back into the game. It’s not full rehab; it’s just enough to keep the player in the game.

Performing Reset on an aircraft like the big twin-rotor CH-47 Chinook is a larger order. As opposed to a complete overhaul which takes an aircraft back to “like new” condition, Reset cleans, inspects and repairs aircraft to FMC (Fully Mission Capable) status. This means washing and disassembling the aircraft, inspecting it, ordering, replacing or repairing parts, and structural or other components that have either worn out or been damaged through normal use or combat injury.

Then the team must reassemble the aircraft, run full systems diagnostics, check flight parameters, conduct test flights and tick off every required element before the craft can be released back to its unit.

Assess the damage
“The primary damage we see is to main structural components,” Parker says. “That’s not something you would normally see but you have to put it in context — you’ve got an aircraft that would normally fly 10 to 20 hours a month, and now it’s flying in the neighborhood of 100 hours a month. Those aircraft really weren’t designed to fly as much or as hard as they are being used over there in combat.”

Although the aircraft types coming to Fort Lewis are the same, their condition and injuries are anything but; some fly in under their own power with hardly a scratch; others limp in or are hauled in on flatbed trucks with critical systems shot to hell.

“Bullets can do a lot of damage,” Parker deadpans.

But regardless of its injuries, each aircraft must be returned to FMC status. It’s a difficult, unpredictable job; the Reset teams never know which parts an injured aircraft will need or how long it might take to get them. In aviation, the lead time for parts orders, even for commodity items, is typically measured in months, not days or weeks. To address this, the Fort Lewis team became more predictive in its ordering processes.

Surround the supply dump
“One big thing we did was change the way we order and manage spare parts,” Parker says. “We began to frontload that stuff — as soon as we get the work order number and we know the aircraft is coming in, we initiate that order and try to bring in those common parts before the aircraft gets here.”

Dale’s group next worked on leaning the Reset process itself. Every activity and step to accomplishing that activity is contained in workbooks that guide the mechanics through the reset process. These workbooks are derived from Technical Bulletins (TB), which contain the master instructions for every component of an aircraft. However, Technical Bulletins do not set the sequence in which work should be done. Dale’s team created a value stream map of the TB instructions, added their own experience and created a new work breakdown structure — and a new workbook.

Synchronize your watches
“We rewrote the workbook so inspection schedules and steps flow with maintenance and everything happens when it should be happening,” he summarizes.

“The workbook tells you exactly when to do a task, how to do it and the order in which it needs to be done. That cuts out a lot of waste; we don’t have guys flipping through pages anymore, going all over the place and duplicating their efforts.”

Next, the new workbook was copied and placed in every reset dock in the facility. Now each team would learn to perform every job the same way in the same sequence.

Post a lookout
And, because it contains the estimated time to complete each job, the workbook is both a schedule and an early warning system.

“Each day, the workbook tells the Reset team what they need to accomplish to stay on schedule and meet the TAT required so we can get all these aircraft done,” Parker says. “If you are inspecting landing gear, the work breakdown structure tells you all the things you have to disassemble and how long it should take. If you aren’t able to complete all the work you are supposed to on day one, then right there you know you’ve got issues. Either you were unable to get a part, didn’t have enough men on the job or something, but if you end up behind schedule on any given day, the workbook tells you and surfaces the things slowing you down.”

This allows maintenance leaders on the floor to stay abreast of work progress and gives then early warning of problems that may need higher level AMCOM assistance. When you’ve got 200 aircraft in line for service and only a few facilities to do the work, such delays, if left unchecked, can quickly become enormous backlogs. For this reason alone the revised workbooks and the leaner work procedures they reflect have been immensely valuable.

Check the map
Other lean tools implemented by the Fort Lewis Reset teams include 5-S projects on each Reset dock and the much needed standardization of parts racks.

“We mapped out all our parts racks and now every dock’s racks are set the same way,” he notes. “If you go to any rack on any dock, the same components will be in the same place on every one. It’s all labeled and everybody knows where all the parts are. That’s been a major timesaver.”

Parker’s team is now working on creating kits for common Reset tasks, much like other shops with more predictable work, such as engine shops, do already. His team is also working with those shops to create flow charts to help keep components moving smoothly from one operation to another so they all end up back in the aircraft just in time.

Good work: Now do it again
“Lean has changed the way everybody here performs,” he says. “Before implementing some of these lean practices, our TAT on CH–47s was somewhere between 120 and 150 days. We currently run between 90 and 120 days, and that’s a significant reduction in TAT.”

“We have four docks for the CH-47 and four docks for the Black Hawks right now and when we’re working like that, the teams start to compete with each other. About 119 days is the standard TAT for the CH-47 process, but now our goal is 90. It’s a big challenge, but when a team makes it, that’s a big thing for them. They can say, ‘Hey, we did it. Now it’s your turn.’ ”

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

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