Photo By Aldo Anderson | USS George H.W. Bush (CVN 77) departed Norfolk Naval Shipyard after completing its...... read more read more
Editor’s Note: Norfolk Naval Shipyard’s Strategic Framework is a tool to communicate the shipyard’s mission and vision statements, and shows how initiatives executed across the command tie together with why NNSY exists—to deliver warships. In order to bridge the gap between mission and vision, NNSY has identified four critical focus areas—our pillars. These pillars are the highest priority strategic focus areas we must urgently work to improve. They are Infrastructure; Dependable Mission Delivery; People Development; and Process Improvement and Innovation.
Earlier this year when the Dependable Delivery Mission Pillar Team (MPT) was formed, the members were given a high priority tasking of finding ways to increase productive capacity to ensure Norfolk Naval Shipyard (NNSY) delivers on time, every time, anywhere to protect America.
“Overall, we established four key focus areas with ‘Get Real’ (current state) measures and ‘Get Better’ (future state) goals and are tracking our progressive measures and targets within each focus area to assess the effectiveness of the actions taken,” said Engineering and Planning Manager (Code 200) and Dependable Mission Delivery Team Lead Mike Zydron. “All are aligned to increase overall productive capacity with specific focus on increasing straight time charges each day to progress in-yard Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) availability work to on-time completion.” Productive capacity is defined as the number of our people executing wrench turning work, measured in resources per day, within budgeted job allowances.
The MPT is using a systems-based strategy on its first pass to identify the following four MPT focus areas to measurably increase productive capacity: reduce overhead; optimize direct support services; improve production efficiency; and inventory and reassign targeted other direct work. MPT team members paired up to lead a particular focus area to determine what improvements could be made, put them into action and be held accountable to obtain hard results.
“We were at the highest usage of overhead resources per day that we have seen,” said Business and Strategic Planning Manager (Code 1201) Maria Williams. “We were not holding ourselves accountable to labor expenditures and had no documented plan to get better by department or overall shipyard.”
The MPT performed a bottom-up review of the shipyard’s overhead resources per day by department and have identified areas for improvement and reduction. A phased overhead labor expenditure plan was developed for Fiscal Year (FY) 2022 and will be tracked monthly to ensure each department is aligned with the execution parameters. This will allow the shipyard to take mitigating actions in a timely manner to remain on plan. The goal is to reduce overhead by approximately 215 to 235 resources per day to meet corporate targets.
Freeing up overhead positions will allow NNSY to reassign the billets to the waterfront, in particular, on the project itself. There were less mechanics who perform the actual work on CNO availabilities earlier this year than there were in 2013.
“We had approximately 1,450 allocated resources (mechanics) in yard at the start,” said Operations Officer (Code 300) Capt. Michael Oberdorf. “We took integral steps to the point where we are now at approximately 1,850 mechanics directly assigned to a project, not counting those on leave or in training. Our goal is to have 2,300 resources available at any given time.”
The MPT identified early this year that production efficiency over the last seven years fell significantly from a .83 in FY14 to .65 in Jan of FY21. Through the MPT production efficiency focus within the “Get Real, Get Better” initiative, total production has improved to a cost performance of .72. “We are moving in the right direction but we must sustain these efforts to meet our goal of a .75 cost performance in Nov. 2021 and a .85 in May 2022,” said Production Resource Manager (Code 900R) Toney Pierce.
NNSY provides services to the Fleet and to other government agencies that do not directly correlate with CNO availability projects. In March, the MPT identified 10 functional areas of other direct work requiring 738 full-time equivalent on average to execute. Currently, the Business and Strategic Planning Branch is assessing six capabilities to divest in parallel with discussions at the corporate level and the Shipyard Capabilities Team.
Over the course of the last few months, the MPT has worked collaboratively to meet the shipyard’s mission to repair, modernize, and inactivate our Navy’s warships and training platforms on time, every time.
“When we started the MPT, individual departmental representation in meetings was more pronounced,” said Zydron. “As we moved forward with an aggressive weekly drumbeat, we saw the department boundaries blend to work together as a group of leaders focused on improving the core mission of the shipyard. The overall effort to move the needle on mission delivery is a concentrated effort that will be accomplished by using our strengths from department representatives, subject matter experts and talented people across the shipyard to produce results. It’s all about One Team, One Mission one fight to measurably improve dependable mission delivery and to show why we are America’s shipyard.”
| Date Taken: | 10.11.2021 |
| Date Posted: | 10.12.2021 07:23 |
| Story ID: | 407087 |
| Location: | PORTSMOUTH, VIRGINIA, US |
| Web Views: | 55 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Dependable Mission Delivery Team Makes Great Strides Forward, But Still More to Do, by Troy Miller, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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