MRO Today - State of the union

State of the union

G.T. Bunch started working at American Airlines’ Tulsa Maintenance and Engineering Base 17 years ago as a landing gear mechanic. Since then he has risen on the floor and in the ranks of TWU Local 514, the local branch of the Transportation Workers Union of America. Today he is an elected executive board member and the RO (Resourcing Out) Committee chairman for the entire Tulsa base.

For more than 20 years, the RO Committee labored to find ways to keep work and jobs on the Tulsa base. With each passing year, that became more difficult as corporate management, following the industry trend, began outsourcing maintenance to third party providers.

“We knew early on that we were going to have to improve our processes and cut our turn times to be competitive with the outside world because our competitors today are not the legacy carriers, they are the MROs,” Bunch says.

A more basic impetus was that American was flying the same route other carriers had before it: filing bankruptcy, dumping their bases, their people and their work. American is the only airline today still doing all its own heavy maintenance work.

The union knew it had the people and the skills, but also knew it could not compete against leaner third party MRO providers that were gobbling up the industry’s maintenance business.

“Seeing that going on all around us made everybody realize we had to do something different because what we had been doing wasn’t working,” Bunch notes.

Lean manufacturing offered the best hope, but neither the union nor management could do it alone.

American implemented the process and then Local 514 officers met with American leaders including Oliver Martins and Bob Reding, to work on ways to make the Tulsa base more competitive.

Martins also involved Tulsa base vice president Carmine Romano, who hired Lean experts to drive American’s Continuous Improvement (CI) program in Tulsa. Both men became key allies with Local 514 in building the Working Together program.

“Harley-Davidson and some others had tried the process,” Bunch observes. “It was working for them and we were watching. When it came to our company, I got involved on the ground level and started learning about CI, self-directed work teams and all the other tools it uses. Part of my RO duties became working with the company’s CI people to make it happen.”

This meant getting his union to go along with it. Getting union membership to buy in was an uphill battle, but once member concerns fears were addressed by a jointly signed letter of job protection, the process began in earnest on the shop floors and in the hangars.

“You take that continuous improvement process to your membership on the floor because they are the experts; they know what needs to be done to improve the process,” he says. “You have to pull your membership in and the way you do that is get down on that floor and let them know they are the ones who can make it work.”

Over the last six months, as the growing program has begun branching out into the hangars, workers have started seeing measurable progress in reduced turn times, reduced inventories and more work coming in.

“We know it’s working because we’re still here — we’re doing our work and everybody else is dumping theirs and closing down their bases,” Bunch says.