Photo By Master Sgt. J. L. Wright Jr. | JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Donna Dewalt prepares an F/A-18 for a center barrel replacement...... read more read more
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – In the business world, decrease of work in progress (WIP) eventually equals a reduction in output. This is not the case on the F/A-18 line at Fleet Readiness Center Southeast (FRCSE) – actually, it means the exact opposite.
In the past year and a half, the military depot decreased the amount of Hornets worked at one time to as little as 17, enabling the command to optimize its WIP.
This decline in numbers is not an indicator that productivity has slowed down at the depot; in fact, the process has become even more efficient and Hornets are making their way back to the fleet at a swifter rate, according to Commander, Fleet Readiness Center (COMFRC) Rear Adm. Paul Sohl.
“The way we are speeding it up now is a thing called critical chain project management (CCPM),” he said in a video about refurbishing the aircraft.
CCPM is a methodology for planning, executing and managing projects in single and multi-project environments. Scientist and philosopher Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt, as a response to problems with traditional project management, developed the concept in the mid-1990s.
Goldratt used the Theory of Constraints paradigm – when a system is limited in achieving goals by a small number of constraints – to identify and remedy business shortfalls.
“The whole idea is: you focus on a small set of aircraft you can work on today, get those aircraft through the system, and then bring the next aircraft in,” Sohl said.
FRCSE Production Officer Capt. (Sel) Wes Joshway said prior to CCPM, artisans were given tasks based on a perceived priority without knowledge of all the problems that could exist.
This perceived priority caused work stop barriers and interfered with throughput.
“Once we ran into a barrier, we stopped work to start on another aircraft. That meant different barriers with varied priorities and no way to truly know what should be done first,” he said. “This caused the inability to provide an accurate completion date to return it to the warfighter.”
Navy leadership is confident the overall life span of the aircraft can be extended through proper maintenance and upgrades performed at the depots. However, because of the high number of fixed-wing assets being deployed globally, there are more aircraft reaching these limits sooner than expected.
More than 50 percent of the Navy’s fleet of older Hornets are currently in an out-of-reporting state, according to Lt. Cmdr. Q Sterling, FRCSE’s F/A-18 production officer and Hornet test pilot.
Sterling said the decision to extend the life span of the aging aircraft from 6,000 hours to 8,000 and possibly even 10,000 hours means a lot more aircraft will receive overhauls at FRCSE.
“A significant number of aircraft are awaiting depot-level work or other maintenance to get back to the fleet,” he said. “That makes our efforts to increase production extremely critical.”
That is where CCPM comes into play.
“It allows us to focus the right amount of manpower with the proper skills required to complete a task,” Joshway said. “CCPM, with the correct data, helps manage work stop barriers and priorities to ensure an effective and efficient flow of aircraft through the pipeline.
“Knowing the critical chain and utilizing the constraint, buffer, and penetrating task helps to stabilize the structure, thus improving throughput and predictability,” he added.
The F/A-18 line at FRCSE is not the first to use CCPM to improve its processes; the P-3 line saw success in the late 2000s and the Vertical Lift line recently recorded success using CCPM. A year ago, the Vertical Lift line recorded a significant reduction in MH-60 and Fire Scout cycle time and WIP, according to Angello Evans, vertical lift and flight test integrated product team lead.
He said the MH-60 line yielded a 47 percent reduction in cycle time, while the Fire Scout, a relatively new product line, reduced cycle time by six percent.
Both lines reduced WIP by more than a third and increased throughput by 22 and 33 percent respectively.
FRCSE is evolving using CCPM and aims to provide the warfighter accurate aircraft delivery dates to their flight lines, according to Joshway.
“This in turn allows leadership to schedule their planned maintenance intervals, ensuring they can maintain the readiness necessary to globally support the naval aviation enterprise,” he said.
“That’s what excites me about this whole thing – we’re seeing results today,” Sohl said.
| Date Taken: | 06.10.2015 |
| Date Posted: | 06.10.2015 14:34 |
| Story ID: | 166138 |
| Location: | NAVAL AIR STATION JACKSONVILLE, FL, US |
| Hometown: | CHAMBERSBURG, PA, US |
| Hometown: | JACKSONVILLE, FL, US |
| Hometown: | PORTLAND, OR, US |
| Hometown: | RIVERSIDE, CA, US |
| Web Views: | 192 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
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