Robins makes dramatic improvements in production
WARNER ROBINS -- In his 25 years at Robins Air Force Base, Doug Keene has seen times of improvement but never anything like what has happened in the past year.
Two years ago the base was failing woefully at one of its most important jobs, which is to finish aircraft on time. The only higher priorities are safety and quality.
On Oct. 1, 2010, only 47 percent of aircraft were finished on time, and many were not only late but very late. That’s a big problem because the planes are much needed by troops in the field.
A few weeks later Maj. Gen. Robert McMahon took command of the Warner Robins Air Logistics Center and started preaching a concept called “horizontal integration.”
Today, halfway through the fiscal year, the base has produced 90 aircraft and only two were late, for a 97.7 percent on-time delivery rate. The two that were late were only a few days late.
Meanwhile the base has also made significant strides in improving safety and quality.
“This is the best year I’ve ever seen,” said Keene, the top civilian in the 402nd Maintenance Wing. “I tell you, we are a team. We’ve got common goals across the center. I’ve seen the strongest commitment to really be world class that I’ve ever seen.”
Col. Evan Miller, commander of the 402nd Maintenance Wing, had never heard of horizontal integration before he arrived at Robins last May. Now he is hearing it from other leaders at other Air Force bases who know about the transformation at Robins.
Horizontal integration explained
In essence, horizontal integration is a rejection of the “not my job” mentality.
To fully understand how it works at Robins, it would first be helpful to know what must happen from the time a plane lands for programmed depot maintenance until the time it heads back to its home base. Getting the job done on time takes much more than just the efficiency of the mechanics.
Think of them as an infantry unit in the combat zone. To function properly, it takes a much larger army in the rear to, in a timely manner, get the parts, supplies and knowledge they need to accomplish the job.
As mechanics work on the plane and disassemble it, they ship parts, ranging from the size of a conference room to the size of an ink pen, to shops around the base. Various specialists then refurbish, test, replace or manufacture parts. Meanwhile, hundreds working in the vast cubevilles of buildings 300 and 301, ranging from contracting specialists to engineers, perform varying jobs to make sure mechanics have what they need.
Eventually, the parts all find their way back to the plane, and if just one shop fails the job can’t be finished. Even such personnel as building maintenance workers and computer technicians are considered critical because the work can’t be done if power outlets aren’t working or computers are crashing.
“If anybody thinks depot maintenance is easy, there are many people and organizations that factor into this,” said Col. Randall Burke, commander of the 402nd Aircraft Maintenance Group. “At the end of that whole chain of events is maintenance. We have the final product, but we rely on many other sources to make that happen.”
Collaboration considered key
The problem, as McMahon saw it, is that the many units involved in producing the planes were so focused only on their job that they weren’t seeing the big picture. Horizontal integration encourages all units, no matter their specific job, to focus on the larger goal of finishing planes on time.
It’s like when a basketball player is so zoned in on seeing how many points he can score, he forgets the object is to win the game.
Ed Montano, deputy director of the 402nd Aircraft Maintenance Group, gave an example.
The group was sending thousands of parts to the 402nd Commodities Maintenance Group, which works on and repairs major structural components. Each part came with a separate due date, which made it difficult to manage and track all those different dates and make sure work was completed on time. To resolve the problem, the two organizations worked together and came up with a new way. Instead of making separate orders for each part, they combined all the parts to be refurbished for one plane into two dates, one for parts to be refurbished and another for parts to be manufactured. That has helped significantly, Montano said, because even if a couple of parts are late they can manage that, and it’s much easier for both organizations to plan.
Instead of just sending parts and leaving it up to the Commodities Maintenance Group to do its job, they worked with the group to understand how to help them do it better.
Montano said he has never seen such a transformation in such a short period of time.
“It’s incredible,” he said. “It’s night and day. The improvements I’ve seen in this last year, I have not seen in my previous 31 years.”
Maintenance revamped
While horizontal integration has been the guiding mantra behind the turnaround, there’s much more to it than that.
One key change, High Velocity Maintenance, was in the works before McMahon arrived, but he quickly became its biggest cheerleader. At that time it was just beginning to be used on C-130s but now is used on all aircraft.
It revamps the way maintenance is done and is patterned after the practices of commercial airlines.
An important element of High Velocity Maintenance is to know more about the aircraft before it arrives, so if it needs special work, the necessary tools and parts can be obtained and ready before it gets here. In many cases teams go to operational bases and inspect the planes before arrival, but at the very least they contact those bases and try to find out what the plane might need.
Additionally, it lays out a detailed daily work schedule, so the hundreds of tasks to be done on a plane are done in the same order and in the same way each time. That allows mechanics, managers and support personnel to easily know what is being done on any given day, so the right parts, tools and mechanics are available.
Even efforts to improve safety have helped improve on-time delivery. When mechanics are working on large C-5 pylons, for example, they previously had to do a lot of bending over and standing up. Now they have flaps on a hydraulic dolly that raises or lowers to where they are working. That has been credited with not only helping get the work done faster but reducing reports of physical problems for mechanics.
Communication improves
Keene believes the weekly command center meeting started by McMahon has made a big difference. It’s an unusual meeting in which leaders from around the base gather in an empty room, standing the entire time, and discuss issues going on within their unit. Every reported injury, no matter how minor, is also discussed.
Keene said it has brought on an unprecedented level of communication. Now if a unit is having a problem, every other unit knows about it and works to help resolve it.
“If something is a hot issue, everybody knows it’s a hot issue, and that’s what drives it because we get very quick issue resolution when something goes wrong,” he said. “I promise you everybody knows when we’ve got an airplane that is close to being late.”
Continuous process improvement
Another important buzz phrase, one pushed throughout the Air Force, is continuous process improvement. That is a rejection of the “because that’s the way we’ve always done it” response.
Even if units are meeting deadlines and performing well, they are encouraged to always examine how they are doing things and explore ways to do it better.
It’s also why, if you ask base leaders whether they can sustain their current success, that’s not the word they really want to use.
Keene believes that not only can the base sustain its success, but it still has plenty of room for improvement.
He notes that many of the changes such as High Velocity Maintenance are still far from being perfected.
About two months into the fiscal year, when on-time delivery was still at 100 percent, McMahon acknowledged it was unlikely the whole year would go by without a plane being late.
However, Keene said, as the work force becomes more accustomed to the new methods, he sees no reason why the base couldn’t have perfect on-time delivery next year. Even with McMahon leaving this summer, Keene believes the changes are ingrained enough that he sees base performance going nowhere but up.
“I will tell you, yes, Gen. McMahon was the lead, but there are people in place who very strongly believe we can be world class,” he said. “From my level all the way down, there are people in place who have the best continuous process improvement I’ve ever seen.”
To contact writer Wayne Crenshaw, call 256-9725.
This story was originally published April 12, 2012 at 5:03 PM with the headline "Robins makes dramatic improvements in production."