n COVER STORY
Lean+
It ties us together
Initiative is gaining traction, making
progress by bringing together Boeing
and its suppliers, customers, partners
I
t’s been a year and a half since Boeing launched its four companywide 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 success stories and talk about what still needs to be accomplished.
12
Q: Help us understand what Lean+ really is.
A: It’s really very simple. Lean+ is about creating an environment 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.
May 2007 BOEING FRONTIERS
n COVER STORY
• 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 people 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 various 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.
No corner left unturned
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
Energy Con
servation Id
entifier
Q: Are we making real progress? How do we know?
TURN OF
F
When Not
In Use
This equipment
can be turned
off to Conserve
Energy
RICHARD RAU PHOTO
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
Continued on Page 14
“Working together,
we’ll make Boeing
the benchmark for
productivity.”
—Bill Schnettgoecke, vice president
and Lean+ leader
BOEING FRONTIERS May 2007
13
n COVER STORY
Lonnie Quiroga photo
The Ft. Greely, Alaska,
“Frozen Chozen” Employee Involvement team
of the Ground-based
Midcourse Defense
program installs a recent
Lean+ project: handling
equipment to properly
route product cables.
GMD uses Lean+ to add value to customer
Eliminating duplicate documentation in the weapons system integration 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.
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 principles will work for everyone; we know that because we’ve seen it.
Even with the progress we’ve made, there’s still tremendous opportunity 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 customers’ 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 continuousimprovement tools you just mentioned are part of the Lean+ toolkit.
However, I’ve seen that we’re losing efficiency in many cases because we are misusing tools and often not using the tools we have.
The Lean+ team is working with others from across the enterprise to
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 resulting 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 improvement 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 suppliers 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
Continued on Page 16
14
May 2007 BOEING FRONTIERS
n COVER STORY
BCA, IDS work together on Material Management
The Material Management organization of Commercial Airplanes
brought Lean into the office. Its
vision: Make Boeing the preferred
supplier of parts, materials and logistics information to customer airlines.
Now, IDS Support Systems is adapting best practices from BCA’s process
to improve satisfaction of Boeing’s
government customers.
The BCA team set a goal to reduce dramatically 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, resources and authority to respond quickly. Many requirements can be
resolved within half an hour of the initial customer contact. Requirements that take more than 30 minutes to resolve are directed to the
appropriate follow-on cells for resolution.
Jim Anderson photo
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.
Lean in action: El Segundo, Calif.
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.
Kevin McNab (right),
director of S&IS Electronics Products, and sensors
manager Neal Morikawa
study a production board
at the S&IS satellite facility. This site used Lean
tools to improve its
performance.
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 president. “BCA and IDS Material Management employees will continue to
work together and share process improvements and best practices to
ensure success on both sides.”
Gladys Wickering PHOTO
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.
—Jeff Wood
BOEING FRONTIERS May 2007
15
n COVER STORY
Continued from Page 14
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 screwdrivers. 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 standards, 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 nonstandards, that creates variation and waste in the system.
Q: You’ve talked about extending Lean+ into our entire 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 services 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 examples 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 problems together and doing what’s best for our customer.
Continued on Page 18
Partnering in Pre-Production in Everett
McInelly, an engineer by trade, is the PPC’s Lean and workshop facilitator,
while Bowman is an operations manager and Bates represents manufacturing. 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 alterations and disruptions to the production system,” said Bowman.
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 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.
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.
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.
Gail Hanusa photo
“We recognized there was rework and waste in the system,” said IRC
Director Beth Anderson. “We developed the Pre-Production Center to better support the vision of the Boeing Production System.”
“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 RightSized 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 considered “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
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 mechanic; and Scott Bowman, IRC operations manager.
16
May 2007 BOEING FRONTIERS
RON BOOKOUT PHOTO
Members of the Super
Hornet–46 High Performance Work Organization
show off fluorescent dye
materials. Clockwise from
upper left: Michael Taylor,
Greg Benfer, Dan Wagoner
and John Clayton.
Shining a light on F/A-18 improvements
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 quality of their output and the efficiency of their processes.)
Lean in action: Renton, Wash.
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 damage or even destroy an aircraft.
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.
ED TURNER PHOTO
During one such inspection, Dan Wagoner of the F/A-18 Final Assembly Splice team wondered, “Why can’t we make FOD glow in the
dark?” Wagoner’s frustration turned into inspiration, as the team decided 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 fasteners 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,” Wagoner 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
BOEING FRONTIERS May 2007
17
n COVER STORY
Continued from Page 16
Q: What’s your vision of how Lean+ will shape
Boeing for the future?
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.
A: It starts with leadership setting the environment and expectations that will nurture the culture, where we’re always focused on
continuous improvement. Leaders teaching; leaders setting the example. 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 focused 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 necessary 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 visibility 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 productivity. n
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 nonfactory 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 engineering 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 improvement 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 organizations. If you are just beginning the training journey, ask your
manager how to get involved, contact your local Lean+ representative, or go to the Lean+ Web site (http://leo.web.boeing.com on the
Boeing intranet) for more information.
Hiring gets Lean, too
Lean in action: St. Charles, Mo.
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:
18
RON BOOKOUT PHOTO
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.
• 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 efficiency 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
May 2007 BOEING FRONTIERS
MARIAN LOCKHART photo
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.
Adding up to good financial sense
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 subprocesses that made up the overall business-proposal-generation process.
One discovery the team made through VSM was wasteful complexity 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 Enterprise Office is sponsoring all over Boeing.
BOEING FRONTIERS May 2007
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 dealbooking 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 handoffs 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
19