KC-135 improvement event saves center almost $100K on floorboards

Published Jan. 15, 2010
By Marti D. Ribeiro
Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center Mission Control Center

TINKER AIR FORCE BASE, Okla. -- Last October a team from the Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center developed solutions for the challenges the center faces in the installation of the floorboards on the KC-135 during the maintenance, repair and overhaul process.

The team was comprised of process improvement experts and subject matter experts made up of process owners, maintenance workers, contract vendor who manufactures the floorboards, observers and senior leaders.

Prior to the Rapid Improvement Event, the tankers were taken to pre-dock and had the floorboards removed, inventoried and inspected. They were then shipped to an off-base contract vendor who used the removed boards as templates to make new boards. Maintenance crews had to wait an average of 23 days for the boards to be manufactured and in the mean-time had to install temporary maintenance floors in order to conduct other work on the aircraft.

When the new floorboards arrived, maintenance crews were given material kits with incorrect parts and hardware that included the metal stripping that fits in-between the boards. Crews were forced to shave down the metal strips to fit correctly. Part of the process involved removing the metal strips out on the flight line ramp area. According to Randy Miller a SME from 564th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron, during this phase, the shavings ended up all over the ground causing a serious Foreign Object Detection problem.

"We had serious batching problems and basically filled the pipeline with bad parts," said Dwight VanMeerveld, OC-ALC facilitator and one of the facilitators for the event. "We knew that about 80 percent of the hardware in the kit was incorrect and we really needed to fix that."

According to Andria Johnson another SME from the 564th AMXS, up to $500 in bad parts went into the garbage from the old material kits.

Besides the incorrect tool kits, the RIE team also tackled the floorboard fit problems. They found that replacing the previous process of using the old floorboards as templates with that of creating a standard-size template for the floorboards developed by the contractor using AutoCAD eliminated a lot of variability and waiting time from the process.

"We created floorboards that should fit all aircraft," said Chris Duggan, RIE team lead. "We've tested them on three aircraft and it worked really well on all of them."

He went on to brag about the new floorboards and how they don't have to touch up areas with paint and all of the seams line up perfectly when they're installed.

"We've also changed the process so that we don't remove the floorboards immediately when we receive the aircraft, we just take out the screws to facilitate other maintenance done underneath," Mr. Duggan said, "Under the new process we leave the floorboards in the aircraft and don't replace them until the end of the flow. Previously it could take us one to five shifts, depending on the issues presented in fitting the boards during final installation. Now it only takes us one shift, so we reduce the variability from one to five shifts."

This new floorboard process also eliminated another problem the maintenance workers faced with the cannibalization of parts. "Floorboards wouldn't fit, so maintenance workers would cannibalize boards from other piles slated for different aircraft, thus creating a domino effect in waiting for new floorboards to be manufactured and delivered," Mr. Van Meerveld said. "When they would pull boards from other stacks, they wouldn't use the formal process to indicate the missing floorboard and would just leave sticky notes signifying they'd been taken." He emphasized that it's not the people causing the problems with the floorboards, it's the process.

But after the RIE was completed, not all of the solutions or corrective measures were implemented, which is a common problem with process improvement events.

"One of the hardest parts is implementation and sustainment," Mr. VanMeerveld said. "The RIE team developed corrective measures during the RIE, but we needed to make sure they were actually fully implemented after the event."

Two months after the event, word-of-mouth made it to the facilitators that the tool kit solutions hadn't been implemented.

"We needed to walk the new process after it was in place to make sure the old process was purged and we didn't do that initially," he said. But, eventually the entirety of the new process was implemented, purging out all of the bad tool kits and verifying with all the process owners the steps for ordering, fitting and installing the new floorboards.

According to Mr. Van Meerveld it's important that we verify the improvements developed during RIEs by walking through the process after implementation.

"We don't want our people to think that all of the work we did during the RIE was 'corporate wallpaper. LEAN is about making change that reduces waste from our processes," he said.

Overall, the new process saved $33,000 in labor hours and a total overall of $77,000 in tangible savings.

Editors note: Ms. Ribeiro is a contractor with ICF International