lean+ - boeing

May 2007 BOEING FRONTIERS��

It’s been a year and a half since Boeing launched its four com-panywide initiatives to increase growth and productivity. Frontiers recently sat down with Bill Schnettgoecke, leader of

the Lean+ initiative, to discuss progress to date, review Lean suc-cess stories and talk about what still needs to be accomplished.

Lean+

n COVER STORY

Initiative is gaining traction, making progress by bringing together Boeing and its suppliers, customers, partners

Q: Help us understand what Lean+ really is.A: It’s really very simple. Lean+ is about creating an environ-

ment and culture of continuous improvement. It’s about ensuring we have the right approach in place to achieve the right results: value for our customers.

That approach includes the right processes, principles, tools, work flow, subject matter experts, discipline and culture. These include

• A one-Boeing approach.• A common language.• Consolidated and aligned tools and principles.• Consolidated and standardized training.• Sharing, learning and replication across the enterprise.

It ties us together

BOEING FRONTIERS May 2007 ��

No corner left unturned

n COVER STORY

“Working together, we’ll make Boeing the benchmark for

productivity.”—Bill Schnettgoecke, vice president

and Lean+ leader

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• A focus on the entire value stream—from supplier partners through our customers.• Leaders as teachers.• Engaging our employees, since the people who do the work know the best ways to do it better.

Q: What do you mean by a one-company approach?A: The environment in which we do business only gets tougher

every day, and it will not get any easier. Some large companies that have more complex and diverse product lines than ours have found a common way. This opens up careers and makes it easier for peo-ple to move around the company. There’s no reason why we can’t do the same. But we need to use a standard approach while eliminating the non-standards to achieve optimal results. We need to improve much more rapidly. The hardest part is adjusting our mindset.

Way too often, people tell me they are confused by all the vari-ous tools and approaches. Collectively, we are not as effective as we could be, and we all need to fix that. When we set standards, we need to discontinue those that don’t make the cut. I’m convinced that we have tremendous, untapped potential to work more closely and leverage the one Boeing. We have much to learn from and share with each other. Our customers are counting on it.

Q: Are we making real progress? How do we know?A: The real measure of how we are improving our productivity

is how we’re doing relative to our customers’ satisfaction and our business plan. When we look at the results for 2006, we had great performance, and our customers, stakeholders, employees and communities benefited from that. Productivity through the use of Lean+ clearly was instrumental in achieving those results.

We know we’re making progress, because we’ve seen Lean+ evolving in nonfactory areas. Every function across the enterprise

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Since 2002, Boeing Site Services has conducted Lean Energy Accelerated Improvement Workshops and Lean Energy Assessments at numerous Boeing sites. John Norris, regional energy manager, Enterprise Utilities Management, said the workshops identified many potential improvements. Among them: retrofitting with more efficient lighting; improving heating and air conditioning (HVAC) systems; scheduling lights and HVAC so they’re off when people aren’t present; improving processes for setting thermostats; and increasing employee awareness. To date, the 37 Lean workshops have identified potential improvements that could save Boeing more than $10 million annually in energy costs.

—Kathrine Beck


GMD uses Lean+ to add value to customer

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The Ft. Greely, Alaska, “Frozen Chozen” Em-

ployee Involvement team of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense

program installs a recent Lean+ project: handling equipment to properly route product cables.

Continued from Page 13

has had some level of success at adapting Lean principles. We can no longer say, “Lean doesn’t apply to us.” At some level, these prin-ciples will work for everyone; we know that because we’ve seen it.

Even with the progress we’ve made, there’s still tremendous op-portunity ahead. Many are just starting the journey. As people start to learn and get training, it’s important that they apply what they’ve learned in their workplace. When each employee and every team understand their levels of productivity and are living the culture and using the tools, then we’ll know we’re on the right path. And our cus-tomers’ satisfaction and our financial results will reflect that.

Q: There’s a lot of confusion out there about what tools to use to help improve our productivity. There’s Six Sigma, Accelerated Improvement Workshops, 5S, 3P and many others. How do these tools relate to Lean+, and do they conflict?

A: When it comes to tools, it really gets down to using the right tool for the job and providing standardization and standard work.

In your garage, you have various tools, such as screwdrivers, pliers, wrenches and hammers. You know that to do a job right it takes a variety of tools used properly. Likewise, all these continuous- improvement tools you just mentioned are part of the Lean+ toolkit. However, I’ve seen that we’re losing efficiency in many cases be-cause we are misusing tools and often not using the tools we have. The Lean+ team is working with others from across the enterprise to

Eliminating duplicate documentation in the weapons system inte-gration processes. Improving the drawing release cycle. These are two of 27 Lean+ activities the Ground-based Midcourse Defense program is working on in an effort to provide better support and improved value to the customer.

The program is so serious about making process improvements that add value to the customer, in fact, that every organization within it has identified key Lean initiatives that will address its particular challenges. Their commitment to achieving the cost savings result-ing from the initiative is documented in an opportunity database that’s part of the program’s cost-management system, and tracked until the savings are realized.

To achieve the estimated $14 million in savings from improve-ment activities, the GMD organizations are using a three-phase improvement plan: Value Stream Mapping to identify high-impact Lean+ focus areas for improvement projects, a detailed action plan for each project, and after-action reviews to capture lessons learned and future opportunities.

“The detailed after-action review allows us to see other opportunities, leading to a regenerating improvement process,” said Geoff Schuler, director of Production System Operations and Lean leader for GMD.

The Boeing GMD team is conducting Lean+ activities with key suppli-ers and plans to hold joint Lean+ activities with the customer as well.

“The focus in the supply chain is not only [improving] the processes within each tier of the supply chain, but also the processes that link the tiers,” said Scott Fancher, Boeing vice president and GMD program director. “Ultimately, by working closely throughout the entire supply chain and with our customer, we are delivering the best product to America and its allies.”

—Amy Reagan

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BCA, IDS work together on Material Management

Kevin Mcnab (right), director of S&IS Electron-ics Products, and sensors manager neal Morikawa study a production board at the S&IS satellite facil-

ity. This site used Lean tools to improve its

performance.

The Material Management orga-nization of Commercial Airplanes brought Lean into the office. Its vision: Make Boeing the preferred supplier of parts, materials and logis-tics information to customer airlines. Now, IDS Support Systems is adapt-ing best practices from BCA’s process to improve satisfaction of Boeing’s government customers.

The BCA team set a goal to reduce dra-matically the time it takes to respond to airline requests. Documentation of processes and flow analysis led the team to banish the in-box from the response process and establish the First Responder Cell. Now, customer requirements are routed directly to an employee who has the knowledge, re-sources and authority to respond quickly. Many requirements can be resolved within half an hour of the initial customer contact. Require-ments that take more than 30 minutes to resolve are directed to the appropriate follow-on cells for resolution.

A scoreboard and “andon” lights (above, on pole in front of screen)—familiar Lean fixtures from production areas—allow teammates to communicate the status of their tasks and give cell managers visual cues on any bottlenecks. The goal: Complete every response within four hours.

To reach that time target, the cell has implemented three shifts to support all customer regions. A newly designed dashboard (progress indicator) that measures total transactions and time to complete each item provides each team clear visibility. The current volume is 6,200 transactions a week, with 30 percent completed within 30 minutes. This percentage is significant in light of a 25 percent jump in workflow volume in the cell since December.

IDS Material Management is adapting the First Responder Cell concept to fit the way government customers conduct business. With an initial First Responder Cell in place at St. Louis, sites at Philadelphia, San Antonio, Mesa, Ariz., and Long Beach, Calif., are adopting the concept.

Common, streamlined processes will reduce duplication and help Material Management aggregate and leverage demand across Support Systems operations. Since St. Louis implemented its First Responder Cell, the number of proposals to customers completed within five days jumped from 73 in August 2006 to 256 in February.

“Lean leadership is about empowering people to remove waste, take pride in their work, and continuously share what they learn with other team members,” said Mark Owen, Material Management vice presi-dent. “BCA and IDS Material Management employees will continue to work together and share process improvements and best practices to ensure success on both sides.”

—Jeff Wood

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Lean in action: El Segundo, Calif.


Ask Boeing employees Chris McInelly, Scott Bowman and Kevin Bates who has the best job in the company, and their answers will sound similar. Each will say, “I do.” They form a team on a new Lean design and production concept in Boeing Commercial Airplanes. That concept is called the Pre-Production Center (PPC), located at Boeing Fabrication’s Interiors Responsibility Center (IRC) in Everett, Wash. Started a year ago by McInelly, the PPC develops, validates and refines assembly procedures for aircraft interiors before the products go into production.

The PPC gives IRC mechanics and engineers the opportunity to work together, simulate and perfect build processes in a safe environment before drawings are released. “This is monumentally different from how we designed products in the past and has taken collaboration to a whole new level,” said McInelly.

“We recognized there was rework and waste in the system,” said IRC Director Beth Anderson. “We developed the Pre-Production Center to bet-ter support the vision of the Boeing Production System.”



In the Pre-Production Center at the Interiors Responsibility Center in Everett, Wash., cross-functional teams experiment with aircraft interior assembly procedures before products go into production. From left are Chris McInelly, IRC engineer; Kevin Bates, IRC me-chanic; and Scott Bowman, IRC operations manager.

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McInelly, an engineer by trade, is the PPC’s Lean and workshop facilitator, while Bowman is an operations manager and Bates represents manufac-turing. Over the last decade, they’ve seen the IRC make significant strides in productivity and quality through the use of Lean principles. Traditionally, those improvements were made on interior products already in production. “A drawback to this rework approach is that you incur additional costs not only from the redesign of products, but also from shop-floor-layout altera-tions and disruptions to the production system,” said Bowman.

The 787 interiors work package, which the IRC won in 2004, offered a unique opportunity for the IRC to use its accumulated Lean knowledge in designing and building the new interior. “The PPC became a location where cross-functional teams could safely experiment on new ideas for the 787 work we’d be doing,” said Bates.

One of the latest concepts to come from the PPC, in collaboration with the IRC Right-Sized Equipment Lab, is a moving production line for 787 stowbin strong back assemblies that’s considered “right-sized” for the job. At more and more locations across BCA, Boeing is using right-sized equipment to improve flow, quality and turnaround time while minimizing capital spending.

“Instead of creating parts in large batches that must be stored, right-sized equipment produces just the amount of product needed. So errors in the process can be quickly exposed and eliminated,” said Brad Reeves, IRC Right-Sized Equipment Lab leader. In addition to being “right-sized,” the strong back assembly line is a third-generation moving line that runs on small robotics.

The moving line the 787 stowbins will be produced on is separate and consid-ered “more traditional.” Beginning in June, the IRC will use these two moving lines to produce the stowbins and strong back assemblies for the third 787 airplane—which will be the first 787 flight-test airplane with a full interior.

—Carrie Thearle

Q: You’ve talked about extending Lean+ into our en-tire value chain, from supplier partners to customers. How does this help Boeing?

A: Working together helps our customers because the entire value stream is engaged and working to create products or servic-es that our customers value. And by working our improvements across the value stream, we will get optimum solutions.

We must be careful when we make improvements so that we don’t suboptimize at a team or group level. We can all think of ex-amples where we’ve been a victim of someone else’s improvement. So we must work across the boundaries of functions, programs and even Boeing itself to ensure we’re being inclusive at working prob-lems together and doing what’s best for our customer.

Partnering in Pre-Production in Everett

standardize our Lean+ toolkit, just as we have done in our factories. But we must also stop using the tools that no longer support

our standards. In your garage, you need a flat screwdriver and a Phillips screwdriver. But you probably don’t need a dozen screw-drivers. So when you purge the extra tools from your tool boxes at home, you create more room in your garage and get organized. As many of you know, this is called 5S-ing (Sorting, Simplifying, Sweeping, Standardizing, and Self-Discipline).

We’re doing something similar with Lean+ training and tools. We’re applying the Lean+ principles of 5S and standardization so we get optimized results for our customers. As we set the stan-dards, we must adhere to them in everything that we do—and not fall back to our old ways, because when we hang on to the non-standards, that creates variation and waste in the system.


Inspiration takes many forms, and sometimes it springs from the smallest of comments.

For the Super Hornet–46 High Performance Work Organization, one offhand comment led to a better way to see foreign objects in jets being assembled. (An HPWO is a group of co-workers who are responsible for a common function or product, share common goals and exercise self-determination in continuously improving the qual-ity of their output and the efficiency of their processes.)

Finding foreign object debris (FOD) before it causes damage to an aircraft is a high priority, and finding such objects involves painstaking inspections. Those inspections are traditionally done by shining lights into the aircraft and hunting in tight and often dark spaces for small objects—such as washers, nuts or pieces of debris—that can dam-age or even destroy an aircraft.

During one such inspection, Dan Wagoner of the F/A-18 Final As-sembly Splice team wondered, “Why can’t we make FOD glow in the dark?” Wagoner’s frustration turned into inspiration, as the team de-cided that making the potential FOD glow was exactly the right idea.

To make FOD glow, they began working with support people, such as Greg Benfer, a process-control engineer, and a company that specialized in making fluorescent dyes. The team spent more than a year to find the right formula. They dyed hand tools, marked up fas-teners and small parts, and then “hid” them in an aircraft and tried to find them. When the team shined a black light on the aircraft, sure enough, the items glowed.

The team has received a patent for the idea, and the fluorescent coloring has been added to hand tools in the assembly process. Benfer said fluorescent drilling fluid also is being tested.

“Lots of things have changed since we’ve become an HPWO,” Wag-oner said. “If we have an idea to contribute, no one brushes it off. It’s empowering, and it’s really made a difference in team morale.”

—Kathleen Cook

Shining a light on F/A-18 improvements

Members of the Super Hornet–46 High Perfor-

mance Work Organization show off fluorescent dye

materials. Clockwise from upper left: Michael Taylor, Greg Benfer, Dan Wagoner

and John Clayton.

737 empennage team members Dean Miskimens (left) and Ross Simmons

work on a 737’s vertical fin. The 737 Program’s many

Lean improvements include cutting Final Assembly flow

time from 22 days to 10.

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Lean in action: Renton, Wash.


Hiring gets Lean, too

Q: What’s your vision of how Lean+ will shape Boeing for the future?

A: It starts with leadership setting the environment and expecta-tions that will nurture the culture, where we’re always focused on continuous improvement. Leaders teaching; leaders setting the ex-ample. It’s about the questions you ask and the actions you take. It’s about a culture where our people are engaged and empowered.

The Lean+ culture is about 155,000 employees today and in our future, and the thousands more across our value stream, being fo-cused on first-time quality and continuous improvement every day as a way of life. It’s about engaging the hearts and minds of our employees and empowering them to make the improvements nec-essary to reach ever-challenging goals. It’s an environment where our employees understand why we need to remain competitive to achieve long-term growth. They can see what they need to do to improve their piece of the business. And they have line-of-sight vis-ibility to how they fit into the big picture and how they can make a difference every day. We’ll then achieve levels of performance that we have never seen and where our competitors can’t reach us.

Together we will establish Boeing as the benchmark for pro-ductivity. n

Munitions mechanics Steve Landis (clockwise

from bottom right), Terrance Griffin and Donna Lauser

assemble Joint Direct Attack Munition tailkits. Through Lean, the JDAM program increased its production

rate from 39 units per day to 146.

What’s Boeing’s greatest resource? People. So it makes sense that Lean improvements focused on processes that identify and attract great people would be of significant value.

Two recent changes are part of a Human Resources–sponsored initiative known as the End-to-End Hiring Improvement Program. The program’s primary goal: Improve the overall hiring process by removing inefficiencies, simplifying processes and reducing the time it takes to hire an employee to 30 days, a benchmark for best-in-class companies. Here’s a look at these improvements:

• Three Global Staffing–led Value Stream Mapping events resulted in several improvements to the end-to-end hiring process. One major enhancement that came from an Accelerated Improvement Workshop was the collocation of the dedicated functions required to hire an hourly employee. This production-based hiring approach, established through partnering with Commercial Airplanes, is focused on meeting the significant increase in demand for employees with production skills. It’s reducing hiring cycle time by decreasing the number of handoffs and improving on-time delivery of personnel. Since the collocated center in Seattle opened in early March, staff members are seeing increased ef-ficiency in coordinating tasks associated with evaluating and assessing applicants and processing an employee through the system.

• The Single Point of Contact project has simplified the process for applicants and hiring managers looking to fill salaried job openings. The project has reduced the number of handoffs during the requisition-and-offer process to a single point of contact. Since the phased implementation began early this year, some areas have seen a 20 percent reduction in the cycle time for completing this process and a significant improvement in the ease of use.

—Bill Woten and Cindy Wall

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As we continue to add more value to our customers than our competitors do, our customers will continue to bring their business to Boeing. That’s how we benefit—and that’s why we’re here.

Q: If you haven’t started on the Lean+ journey yet, how do you begin?

A: Start by thinking out of the box—especially if you’re in a non-factory part of the value stream. Think in terms of “We’re all here to ‘produce’ something that our customers value.” Our “product” could be a part for an airplane or a satellite, or it could be an engi-neering work package, a financial document, or a new hire. Once we put our minds around what it is that we produce, we can begin to measure how productive we are in terms of quality, flow time, customer value, etc. Then we can learn about continuous improve-ment and Lean+ so we can improve all that we do. And because it all starts with leadership setting the example, in late 2006 Boeing laid out a requirement for all executives to complete Lean training by June 2007. Those leaders are now developing and implementing plans to flow down training requirements to their respective orga-nizations. If you are just beginning the training journey, ask your manager how to get involved, contact your local Lean+ representa-tive, or go to the Lean+ Web site (http://leo.web.boeing.com on the Boeing intranet) for more information.


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Lean in action: St. Charles, Mo.


The Finance Transformation Lean Enterprise Office also worked with Boeing Capital Corporation in aligning its accounting processes with those of the companywide accounting system.

One area they examined was how BCC accounting employees record data about airplane leases or loans—referred to as “deals.” Brenda Johnson, technical accounting specialist who helped lead the deal-booking workshop, said training, collocation and technology played significant roles in efficiency improvements.

“We ended up rearranging our work statement and collocating team members capable of doing all the deal-booking and analysis,” Johnson said. “This helps us work together more efficiently and eliminates the wasted time we had spent going back and forth within the building.”

BCC subsequently assigned a specific group of people to manage the entire process of booking deals from beginning to end, reducing hand-offs and authorizations. It also replaced the manual paper approval process with an electronic review and approval process that meets regulatory approval requirements.

The changes are paying off, said Walt Skowronski, president of BCC. The cycle time for booking transactions fell from 16.5 days in August to 7.2 days in December. And making the review and approval process electronic helped BCC zoom along when a snowstorm hit earlier this year. The team was able to work virtually and processed an amazing amount of work: eight airplane deals in two days.

—Kathrine Beck

Frank Colaw knows it’s not easy at times to get people to participate in a Lean workshop.

“It can be very painful to say to very busy people, ‘We need a week of your time,’” said Colaw, director of Integrated Defense Systems Contracts and Pricing in Seal Beach, Calif. “But people see the power of what they’re doing and they’re staying with it and following up.”

Colaw’s Lean team is working to eliminate waste in preparing business offers for contracts IDS is bidding on. With the help of Lean professionals from the Finance Transformation Enterprise Office, this team of IDS financial professionals used Value Stream Mapping to identify the 57 sub-processes that made up the overall business-proposal-generation process.

One discovery the team made through VSM was wasteful complex-ity in the review and approval process for proposals. The team is now taking on those subprocesses, one by one, analyzing them and improving them.

The Finance Transformation Lean Enterprise Office trains and coaches Finance organizations in Lean principles and strategies, and helps them analyze and change processes to reduce waste and improve efficiency.

The team also supports company goals of standardizing accounting procedures across Boeing and reducing the number of systems and tools in use—goals that are part of the Finance Transformation under way across the company. The IDS business-offer workshops are just one example of many events the Finance Transformation Lean Enter-prise Office is sponsoring all over Boeing.

Boeing Capital Corp. accounting employees,

including yeri Hong (left) and Sidney Strong, recently collocated team

members. The result: reduced cycle time and more-efficient working together.

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Adding up to good financial sense

lean+ - boeing

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