ALC aims to improve workload

Published Nov. 25, 2009
By Micah Garbarino
Tinker Public Affairs

TINKER AIR FORCE BASE, Okla. -- "When you combine speed with quality, you have a winning formula for success."

That's the focus in the 76th Maintenance Wing and a philosophy that will help them achieve their goals, said Brig. Gen. Bruce Litchfield, 76th MXW commander.

As the champion of the Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center's third strategic goal, to "improve depot maintenance productivity to maximize opportunities," the organization plays a key role in helping the center accomplish its mission to "deliver and sustain air power...anytime, anyplace." The 76th MXW's focus is the overhaul and repair of some of the Air Force's most critical weapons systems, engines, commodities and software.

"The better we do our job, the more capability we can deliver to the Air Force," General Litchfield said.

When it comes to maintaining more aircraft, the biggest challenge for the center is space.

"We're not going to see a substantial change in the number of hangars or facilities. The cost is hundreds of millions of dollars," said General Litchfield. "What we have to do is minimize the time an aircraft is on station so that we can cycle more aircraft into the ALC."

To ensure success, the main goal has two sub objectives that need to be tackled. General Litchfield looks at these objectives like a competition. "You can't be a championship team if you don't win the big games," he said.

The first objective of the 76th MXW is to "guarantee first-pass performance." To meet this objective, they wing needs all capabilities delivered to the field to be 100 percent mission ready. Streamlining processes does not mean sacrificing quality.

"It's kind of like your mother always told you," General Litchfield said, "'If you don't have time to do it right the first time, when do you have time to do it right?'"

Internally, this means that shops need to eliminate re-work, only touching a product once. It is important that incomplete work is not passed along to the next station in the process. There also needs to be a constant "feedback loop" so that problems in the process are identified and fixed. The Lean process and Rapid Improvement Events are tools vital to success.

"When we have the professionals who work on these products every day, identifying constraints and extra work and fixing these problems on the shop floor, it really begins to pay off in spades," General Litchfield said.

The second objective is to "improve cycle times." Simply put, cycle time is the amount of time taken to complete a given task. It could be the amount of time an aircraft is in depot, or the amount of time taken to complete one phase of maintenance.

The entire cycle time that a product is in depot is the ultimate measure of success, and is driven by the warfighter's availability requirements. The wing has taken this allotted time and broken it up into smaller chunks called "gates" to get an accurate measure of both speed and quality in each area.

Using aircraft as an example, the gates are: stripping and washing, inspection, structure work, build-up (putting everything back together) and post-doc (performance checks). Each gate is allocated a specific amount of time, which allows problems to be identified sooner because each step can be evaluated.

"We watch carefully. If the aircraft are not able to flow through the gates in the set time period, we initiate Lean events to help identify what we can do better to drive down time. This is paying off across the board," General Litchfield said.

This new way of looking at the maintenance timeline will bring the depot picture into clearer focus for the wing and allow them to meet their allocated cycle times and fulfill the warfighter's needs.

"But we're not going to stop there. Once we improve from there, that's when we can start to take on more work. By us being able to do that, we can help the Air Force by producing more capability at less cost, which is a win-win," General Litchfield said.

While the 76th MXW is the champion of the third goal, the wing relies on everyone to be successful. From personnel and engineering, to IT capability and parts, several organizations play a part in making everything function.

"This goal may be assigned to the maintenance wing, but this is really about Tinker working together to meet the warfighter's needs," General Litchfield said. "We have some of the most dedicated and experienced professionals who I am confident will meet the challenges that we face. Our job as leaders is to eliminate the constraints that keep our folks from achieving their full potential."

Editor's note: This is the third in a series of articles dedicated to the strategic goals of the OC-ALC. For more on the goals, visit Tinker's internal Web page.