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Focus on LAI
Plenary
Air
Force Air Logistics Center Takes Aim at Enterprise-Level Lean
Major
General Kevin Sullivan assumed command in July 2003 of the Ogden
Air Logistics Center (ALC), a 13,000-employee Air Force operation
in Utah experimenting with a few lean projects. By fall, Sullivan had
committed Ogden ALC to enterprise-level lean transformation in partnership
with the Lean Aerospace Initiative. This interview, conducted during the
LAI Plenary in March, outlines the initiative's progress and the challenges.
What experience
did you have with lean principles before becoming commander of Ogden ALC?
I'd read The Machine
that Changed the World in the early '90s, but I had no personal exposure
to lean processes or deploying lean in an organization.
Was lean
already on the ALC's agenda when you came to Ogden?
Doing business more
efficiently was on the agenda and we were doing some lean deployment at
the tactical level. The Department of Defense and the Air Force have embarked
on what we call transformation. The Secretary of the Air Force had challenged
the air logistics centers, prior to my getting to Ogden, to go out and
benchmark against industry and to begin to do business in a world class
manner.
What evidence
at Ogden encouraged you to pursue lean principles?
I spent the first
75 days looking at my center before I set a direction for the organization.
That's when I came to understand the results of lean – partially
through talking to the leaders of lean efforts and partially through seeing
how we had deployed lean in a small number of locations. I became a believer
just by watching. We now have lean events going on in about 65 different
areas.
What examples
of lean influenced you?
I saw that we could
do business with a lot less space and in less time. I also saw a work
force that was really enthusiastic about what they were doing. I saw a
huge change in our lean work cells, where five or six dispersed tasks
were pulled together and the workers were given as much control as possible.
There, the employees were enthusiastic about doing things better. That's
what sold me more than anything.
Why did you
decide to champion lean principles on the enterprise level?
About every two months,
I spend the day offsite with my senior leadership team looking at how
we should manage the center long term. At the first offsite, we committed
to continue tactical deployment of lean events on our production floor
and move to above-the-shop floor events as the opportunity presented itself.
But it bothered me that we had no strategic approach to how we were going
to deploy lean throughout the center. We didn't have an enterprise level
look at how we were going to do it.
At the second offsite,
Terry Bryan came to talk about something called Enterprise Value Stream
Mapping and Analysis. Terry offered a mechanism for getting to that strategic
look at how you are going to deploy lean across the enterprise. I had
a problem and Terry and the LAI people had a solution and the timing was
just perfect
Are your
peers looking for similar kinds of solutions?
All three of the
Air Force ALCs, including Ogden, Oklahoma City, and Warner-Robbins in
Georgia, have evolved to lean as the cornerstone of their transformation
activities, but they did it separately. We’re much more tightly
linked in our planning for the future, though, and Oklahoma City is now
talking to LAI as well.
What management
changes have been pivotal to streamlining Ogden’s enterprise?
We're three months
into this process so we are fairly new. The biggest thing is that I have
established an Enterprise Leadership Team to provide some governance across
our enterprise. The other change is that we committed to training 11 of
our folks as lean black belt candidates. Our initial plan is to let those
black belts run three enterprise-wide lean projects to get us started.
What’s
been the value of LAI tools like Enterprise Value Stream Mapping to your
organization?
Value Stream Mapping
has helped us understand our enterprise and how we are connected. The
Lean Enterprise Self Assessment Tool (LESAT) has been very valuable in
letting us know that we have a long way to go.
What challenges
are involved for the military to learn to work as a networked and less
hierarchical organization?
If we were doing
this 15 years ago, I would probably put out a letter saying we are going
to do lean and I would have expected everyone to do it. I don't think
the Air Force today is any more hierarchical than most businesses. We
recognize now that we absolutely need buy-in from our workforce, which
at Ogden is 70 percent civilian. More importantly, our workforce –
the people doing the processes – are the only ones who can map their
processes and understand where the waste is. We can't issue the answer.
We have to make sure people are trained and understand why we are doing
what we are doing.
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