October 2006 Evading the Law A UT-Knoxville MBA graduate and professor use lean manufacturing to lessen the impact of Parkinson’s Law By Sara C. Shoemaker
The Wind Beneath Its Wings?: The application of lean manufacturing principles and installation of new software helped Warner Robins' already efficient workforce get better
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” was the message UT-Knoxville MBA graduate Bill Best encountered upon arriving at Georgia’s Warner Robins Air Logistics Center in late 2004 to head aircraft production of the U.S. Air Force’s massive C-5 transport planes.
But Best had other plans. With his education in critical chain project management, a lean manufacturing process, still fresh, he relished the chance to stretch his academic muscle in the real world.
“I was immediately excited because I saw possible application to the way we produced aircraft. The timing was very fortunate,” Best says.
He consulted with UT-Knoxville business professor Mandyam “Srini” Srinivasan, purchased specialized software from San Jose, Calif.-based Realization Technologies and employed critical chain techniques that radically cut the plane’s repair time from 245 days (an already excellent time) to an impressive 160 days. This saved the Air Force, and taxpayers, $49.8 million in annual revenue and more quickly put these important aircraft back in service.
Convincing Warner Robins’ top brass of the value of the team’s project was an uphill climb, and even Best had to convince himself it was worth the fight.
“I didn’t know specifically that we could get a 40% improvement,” he says.
Once the powers-that-be were on board, the next task was to retrain the maintenance and repair crews—an even tougher audience who had garnered many awards for trimming the number of C-5 repair days and rightfully considered themselves pretty efficient already.
“They see busy-ness as progress. If you give them time, they’ll take it,” Srini says, citing the well-known Parkinson’s Law.
Using the new software, Srini and Best could set up new priorities at each phase of the planes’ repair process and reserve buffer time unknown to the work crews.
In just eight months, Warner Robins reduced its queue of C-5s under repair from 13 to seven. The project’s success was duplicated on the base’s C-130 aircraft, cutting the number of planes to be serviced from 24 to 15.
The team’s results wowed the global operations research and management sciences community, winning Warner Robins the industry’s highest honor this year—the coveted Franz Edelman Award.
Best and Srini’s example makes one wonder just how much revenue could be saved if more business operations kept Parkinson’s Law in mind.
Email to a Friend
Print-Friendly Format