Naval Air Systems Command: Completely Eliminating Unnecessary Reporting

Problem


Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) is responsible for development of fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft and weapons
systems for the U.S. Navy. Within the Command, AIR 4.1 is the organization that provides engineering support for
these systems. During a Lean Six Sigma (LSS) project selection workshop, a team of employees from AIR 4.1 was
reviewing the tasks for which the organization had responsibility and checking their correlation with existing personnel
assignments. It appeared that excess staff time was spent on generating reports that appeared to have limited impact
to accomplishment of AIR 4.1's mission. Specifically, the team identified great variance in the amount of time an
Assistant Program Manager Systems Engineer (APMSE) needed to spend preparing the AIR 4.1 Weekly Report and the
perceived value of the report. Time spent generating the report took away from the ability of those employees to focus
on more important program management/systems engineering tasks. It was hypothesized that improvements to the
efficiency of generating the weekly report could reduce the time these highly valuable employees needed to spend
preparing it.

Approach


To address this issue, a LSS Green Belt team of AIR 4.1 employees was formed. The team mapped the process used
to generate the report in order to identify levels of effort. The team understood from the Seven Forms of Waste
(Overproduction, Waiting, Transporting, Inappropriate Processing, Unnecessary Inventory, Unnecessary/Excess Motion
and Defects) that report generation was a non-value-added activity because it provided process monitoring information
after the fact rather than in real time. This led the team to focus on Voice of the Business and Voice of the Customer
requirements for the report. The team used surveys to determine the value-added benefits of these reports to both the
Command and the APMSEs. The team found that the report was originally required by a former AIR-4.1 leader, but was
no longer read by current leadership. The team looked into the root cause of the origin of the report and found that at
one time it supported decision making, but was no longer relevant.

Instead of improving the process to generate the weekly report, the team recommended its cancellation. This decision
was approved by NAVAIR leadership.

Results


After completing this three-month project, NAVAIR realized a $360,000 cost reducton. The non-value-added weekly
report was eliminated resulting in a 100% cost reduction, and the APMSEs now have more time to concentrate on value-
added work. Report generation is a task that consumes resources in both governmental and commercial organizations.
Simple Green Belt-level projects focused on these tasks could quickly eliminate non-value-added reporting activities
and provide more time for employees to focus on contributing to accomplishment of the main missions of their
organizations.

Eliminating Unnecessary Reporting


Before adding LSS to its management approach, Naval Air Systems Command required highly valuable
systems engineering personnel to write weekly reports. After adding LSS, a relatively low-level Green Belt
team enabled the Command to see that these reports were non-value-added and that they could be eliminated.
Doing so saved NAVAIR $360,000 and more importantly, enabled the systems engineers to spend their time
on more important work. This case demonstrates how easy it can be to eliminate unnecessary reporting in all
government agencies; thereby freeing employees to focus on more important tasks.