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MARCH 2011 | VOLUME 13 ISSUE 1
Jumbo
effort
Maintaining the 747-400
Roomformanoeuvre
Goingforgrowth
Bottomline
Hangars in Turkey and Egypt
Flybe Aviation Services
Aircraft seats
Management
Building efficiency
Value Stream Mapping (VSM) is becoming more common as a management tool
for efficiency in MRO
V
SM was developed by the Toyota
car company to analyse the flow
of material and information
required for efficient production. While it
combines many of the usual elements
associated with Lean and Six Sigma, it goes
much further by looking at the entire process.
In this way, each sub-process may have been
made as Lean as possible, but VSM often
identifies delays and inefficiencies in the way
the work moves between production cells.
Frank bamford, Senior Vice President business
Development and Strategy at GKN Aerospace,
says his company has adopted VSM from the
automotive side of the company’s business.
Although GKN Aerospace makes extensive use
of Lean and Six Sigma, he says these techniques
48 MRO Management
often happen at the point of manufacture,
whereas VSM is being used to drive efficiencies
from the design stage to end of life. The biggest
change for his company in its thinking is that
VSM goes outside the factory to include the
entire supply chain.
He explains that he was converted to VSM
during a training course exercise in which his
group had to build an aircraft out of a child’s
construction bricks. At the first attempt, they
built five models in 30 minutes. by analysing
the process, some took on responsibilities for
building subassemblies that were then put
together by the others. The end result was a
completion rate of one aircraft a minute for the
same period of time – a simple but illuminating
way to prove the value of VSM.
Acceptance is the greatest challenge. While
it took four months to train ‘a bunch of sceptics’,
he says, three or four years later the top 1,000
managers now complete an awareness course
as a minimum and in GKN Aerospace there
are over 300 trained specialists deploying it
throughout the organisation.
www.mromanagement.com − March 2011
Management
Shannon Aerospace has been providing VSM
training for other parts of the company, such
as Lufthansa Technik Sofia and Lufthansa
Technik Malta (photo: Lufthansa Technik)
In one case, an engine component was being
sent around 3,000km across the US for a
treatment process and then sent back for
inspection. Any faults that were found required
another 6,000km round trip at a cost
approaching $900 and taking two weeks.
The simple solution, using VSM, was to train
personnel at the treatment company to carry
out the inspection to GKN protocols. The result
was a 4% reduction in price and a reduction in
the inventory that needed to be held, through
the removal of wasted transactions.
50 MRO Management
In another example, a supplier to GKN
Aerospace announced a significant price
increase because of rising material and labour
costs. This provided an ideal test case for VSM
in the wider world, and it was proved successful
when VSM identified a number of ways to solve
the problem. By working together with the
supplier and applying VSM, the GKN Aerospace
team reviewed all transactions in the process,
including production processes, material
inventory and consolidation of distributed
activities, and identified a number of key
improvements in process flow times, inventory
reductions and increases in value add activities
being transferred to the supplier. Along with
an overall reduction in assembly time from 10
hours to 9.2 hours, and reduced transaction
costs in the value stream, this helped bring
about a 5% price reduction for the component.
The impact of VSM for both GKN Aerospace
and the supplier has been greater value creation
for both parties and a more competitive price
for the end customer – which leads to greater
contract security and potentially more new
business. The end customer ultimately gets parts
faster and cheaper with less inventory in both
the OEM and MRO supply chain. The benefits
are shared, with GKN Aerospace able to recoup
its investment in the process and the supplier
able to invest in its future needs with increased
opportunity to secure additional new business
not just from GKN Aerospace, but also in the
broader customer environment. Bamford says
the company is willing to help its suppliers
in situations like this as VSM brings such
tangible rewards to both parties.
For end of life requirements, he
cites composite manufacture, which
is one of the company’s particular
specialities. At the present time,
recycling this material for scrap is
very limited (see MRO Management,
June 2010), with the biggest
problem being the heat required
to break down the resin binding
the fibres together. He suggests
that the industry should be
talking to suppliers and OEMs
about developing more ecological
alternatives, especially as the latest
new generation aircraft, including
the Airbus A350XWB, will rely on
these types of materials.
Dr Christian Langer, Head of
Lean Production at Lufthansa
Technik, says VSM is one of three methods used
by the company to take a deep look at a
process efficiency, for example to improve
processes in order to reduce turnaround times
for component repairs. The others are ‘day in
the life of’ (to study labour efficiency) and
overall equipment efficiency (to find the time
equipment lies idle or is being replenished or
repaired). Although Lean policy is centralised
at Board level within the Lufthansa Group,
there is still autonomy not only within
the individual companies but within each
company as well.
Unlike GKN Aerospace, Langer prefers to use
VSM from the bottom up, from the individual
to a team to the whole workshop. He can see
that it can be useful on a broader scale but
prefers to use it as a tool to be applied precisely
rather than a major project (‘we don’t need
The project found
that 80% of the reduction was achieved
by optimising activities
inside the shops, with
the remaining 20% coming from more efficient interfaces with
other departments
doctoral thesis papers’). While his group in
Hamburg acts as a central point, much of the
Lean experience resides in the divisions and
subsidiaries of Lufthansa Technik, for example
in Shannon, with Shannon Aerospace Limited
(SAL) and Lufthansa Technik Turbine Shannon
(see MRO Management, June 2008). SAL has been
responsible for training technicians at other
companies in LHT’s overhaul network, such as
in Sofia or Malta.
Malta also used VSM for the layout of their
new hangar project, but this was not controlled
by Hamburg, which is now using it for the new
maintenance hangar to be built at the Berlin
Brandenburg Airport at Schöenefeld. This will
open in 2012, when Lufthansa is going to move
its operation from Tegel to the new airport
with LHT’s line maintenance to follow. This is
the first time that Hamburg has applied VSM
to a green field project and will be able to
www.mromanagement.com − March 2011
Management
By working together and applying VSM, GKN
Aerospace and a supplier achieved a reduction
in assembly time for a component from 10 hours
to 9.2 hours and this helped bring about a 5%
price reduction (photo: GKN Aerospace)
optimise the location of material, tools and
people as well. Not normally used for line
maintenance, where labour efficiency is more
important, it will be applied here to determine
the best location for the facilities in order to
minimise the distance between the hangar
and apron.
An early project using VSM at Hamburg was
LIFT (Lieferung an Fünf Tagen – or Delivery In
Five Days), designed to reduce the turnaround
time of mechanical avionics components from
15 days over a period of three years. Among the
key parameters were benchmarking the lowest
theoretically possible lead time; servicing
equipment in the workshop to ensure it was
available and working properly; minimising
waiting times by eliminating impediments in
the process; and making sure complementary
support processes, such as same day logistics,
were in place.
The project found that 80% of the reduction
was achieved by optimising activities inside
the shops, with the remaining 20% coming
from more efficient interfaces with other
departments. The major finding was that over
the 15 days (each of which had two 8-hour
shifts), touch time only accounted for 10 to
15% of the total. Another project using VSM
was to reduce the time taken for Airbus A340
IL and D checks from 30 days to 26 days. It was
called Mach 26 (from the German ‘to make’),
although Langer recognises a further
improvement, say Mach 20, could appear to
be slower.
Clearly, there is a risk that such a devolved
network might give rise to different practices
and that is why VSM makes such a point of
standardising processes. The idea is that a
customer should not be able tell where in the
network the work has been carried out. At the
same time, he stresses that this is a two-way
system – best practice is not always in Hamburg,
and sometimes not even in Shannon, so there
is a continuous interchange of information and
education between locations.
That these changes have been accepted also
confirms bamford’s assertion that employee
buy-in is a key element in the successful
introduction of VSM.
March 2011 − www.mromanagement.com
MRO Management 51