The Plane Will Not Move!

From Debbie Collard

A C-17 is a huge aircraft. Its tail rises six stories. Watching it being built is an incredible thing.

Aircraft are most typically assembled in a series of positions. You start work in one physical location, then when a set of tasks are completed, you move the plane to a second location, then another until you're done. In the case of the C-17, the main fuselage might be assembled in position a, the tail attached in a different place over in position b, the wings attached in position c, the cockpit electronics installed in position d and so on. For this, you have to have a hangar that's large enough for two or three 747-sized aircraft to be in production along with the equipment. This is a huge amount of square footage. 1500 of our employees would be in this giant hanger. They would be dealing with many, many thousands of parts. It's an incredible production process that requires complex scheduling and coordination.

The speed with which an airplane moves through the different positions is driven by the schedule. If work is not complete at one position when the schedule says it should move, the plane moves anyway and the rework is done at the end. If parts don't arrive on time, but the schedule says you need to move the airplane, you would move the plane and do out-of-position work at the end. As you can imagine, taking apart a plane at the end of the line that has been assembled in modules, adding parts and then reassembling, leads to quality problems and delays. But this was the way the whole industry did things. No one questioned it. It simply was the way we did things. I suppose it was like third grade children going to school 8:00 to 3:00 and sitting in rooms with teachers. Of course you do it that way.

As soon as Koz arrived, he made it clear that the priorities for the C-17 program were to excel in terms of quality, schedule, and cost, in that order. He really raised the bar. We weren't excelling. He set a clear vision of the significantly improved performance we needed. I bet he talked to everyone about this and got much head-nodding. 'Sure Boss'. And I bet most people wanted that vision and did try a little harder. But they accepted the basic production system as it existed as the only way to do things, and with that they accepted certain problems as inevitable. The mindset was-'Yea, it would be nice if we were never out of needed parts but that's impossible in this industry.' So people made small adjustments and this strategy did not come close to achieving Koz's raised-bar vision.

Then one day he stood up in one of our management meetings and said, 'we are not going to move an airplane until it is complete in position. Quality is number 1. So that's what we are going to focus on. Until the plane is done and done right, no movement. Period.'

Everyone thought he was off his rocker. You didn't do things this way. I think some of his direct reports, in particular, thought he was crazy. They were convinced that we would never be able to deliver on time if we did it this way. Never, wouldn't happen, anybody knows that. Something would always happen that would grind everything to a halt. You'd have employees twiddling their thumbs at great expense to the company. You might as well expect cars to be made by secretaries on the 59th floor of the Sears building in Chicago.

We had all heard the quality speech before, but here was a guy telling us that nothing goes anywhere unless it's properly done. That was the right thing, the smart thing to do, and Koz showed complete conviction that this radical idea was right. And if his words did not win us over, all day long we had to look at a plane that was not moving until it was complete in a position. All day long, there it was, not moving. Nope. Sitting there.

After Koz made his proclamation, things began to change faster. The fact that out-of-position work would not be tolerated meant that suddenly having parts arrive on time was critical. Our procurement guys got motivated like I'd never seen before. They started coming up with all kinds of new change strategies for their operation. And--- incredible since this couldn't be done---they started succeeding in getting our suppliers to operate in new ways. So we began getting the right parts at the right time!! Overall, people just didn't want to be the reason that a plane was held in position for longer than it was supposed to. They didn't want to be embarrassed, they didn't want to hurt the company, they didn't want to hurt their careers, they didn't want to let Koz down--- lot's of reasons. So they started breaking through walls. As evidence began to accumulate that this nutty idea might actually be working, more people got with the program. More started finding ways to punch through walls. When they couldn't do it by themselves, they would come to Koz with specific ideas, sometimes very clever ideas, for what was needed, for how problems could be solved. Koz would then work with them to remove the obstacles. So if it helped for Koz to talk to the President of a parts company, he'd do it.

Holding the planes in place eliminated all sorts of bad habits. So no longer could we say, 'of course some percentage of parts won't arrive on time. That's just life'. No, that's not life. That's life as we knew it.

To make a long story short, people got it, we transformed the place, and, as a result, quality has gone up and all of our aircraft have not only been on time, they have been early!!

To this day people still tell this story, from the shop floor to the executive offices. 'He said the plane would not move. Period.'

Based on the above write Consulting Proposal: Plane Will Not Move Assignment.

Definition of Project:

Diagnosis of Current Situation

Recommendations:

Implementation Plan:

Summary: