Air Force Improved Repair of F-16 Radar Antennas at Ogden Air Logistics Center

Problem

Also at the Ogden ALC, the F-16 Radar Antenna shop was facing problems both within the shop and across the entire F-16 fleet. The Radar Antenna shop was unable to repair and overhaul the radar antennas fast enough to meet warfighter demand. With this critical node in the radar antenna supply chain broken, maintainers working in the field were challenged to keep airplanes flyable.

The radar shop had been setup to operate using six stand-alone workstations that fed a single test station and a single test range. Repaired antennas needed to pass quality control checks at both of these sites before they could be returned to the supply chain.

Also compounding the problem was non-standardized repair and overhaul methods, non-centralized supply management, and excessive transportation to obtain repair parts. As could be expected, the bottleneck occurred as repaired radar Antennas from the workstations waited in a queue to be tested. This delay in the process, in addition to wasting time, presented the opportunity for damage and for defects in the repairs to remain undetected for extended lengths of time.

Approach

The first action taken by the leadership at Ogden was to form a core team within the Radar Antenna shop and train it on Lean principals. Then, this team started attacking the cycle time issues facing the shop. The team created standard work sheets for the types of repair and overhaul actions the shop performed. Using these work sheets, the team reorganized the stand-alone workstations into a single-piece-flow work cell format. This enabled the team to establish point- of- use supply parts and tool inventories to eliminate wasted motion. Standardized inspection checklists were developed to catch defects during the process instead of at the test station or test range. This reduced wasted time at these critical test locations.

The team also established daily quality, cost, delivery and schedule meetings to ensure that all team members were aware of changing workloads, quality issues or cost targets.

Results

The team's reorganization of the radar antenna shop and elimination of waste had a dramatic impact. (See Figure 11.) Twenty-five days of waste were eliminated by reducing repair time from 28 days to 3 days – an 89% reduction.

Also, work in process dropped by 88% from 67 antennas to eight; thereby keeping more spare parts in the hands of warfighters. Before the introduction of Lean techniques, antennas were moved around, on average, an unbelievably wasteful 1,950 miles before they completed the repair process. This waste resulted from multiple trips between Ogden ALC and the single test range caused by detecting defects at the range and then returning the antennas to Ogden for rework. This waste was eliminated almost completely and antenna movement was improved by 98% (each now only traveling 33 miles). Backorders dropped to zero and the antenna repair quality improved. Failures, after repair, now happen in the field 50 hours later on average than before the Lean method was applied.