What are you doing to meet today and tomorrow's challenges? Published June 9, 2015 By Col. Charles Nesemeier 436th Airlift Wing Maintenance Group commander DOVER AIR FORCE BASE, Del. -- What are you doing to meet today and tomorrow's challenges? In my 25-year career as an officer in the United States Air Force, I've seen many wings, groups and depots launch process improvement programs such as Total Quality Management, Lean, Six Sigma and Air Force Smart Operations, also known as AFSO. Each program received significant benefits to include: cost savings, improved manufacturing and repair times, more efficient processing times, and better customer satisfaction. However, over time the majority of these organizations gave up and let their units get out-of-shape again. Units, like people, must stay fit and make process improvement a habit to be successful. Our efforts and initiatives here at Dover are to ensure immediate combat readiness and sustainability of our assigned aircraft, equipment, spares, and personnel. Winston Churchill once said, "Gentlemen, we're out of money, now we have to think." In a fiscally constrained environment, process improvement is a combat imperative! AFSO is not only defined by how to decrease touch time and eliminate waste, but as a transformation of how we think and employ the valuable resources we are given in order to accomplish our mission. Every operation performed on a daily basis can be improved, just take a look at what the bold leaders at Dover have accomplished. A couple of years ago, our C-5 Repeat/Reoccur rate metrics were flashing bright red while being shown at the Maintenance Group's Health of the Fleet briefings month after month. After our eyes' cones readjusted, we decided to put a team together to identify the high drivers in an effort to determine if any of them could be significantly reduced or eliminated. Low and behold, this team of maintenance and process improvement experts rapidly identified landing gear discrepancies were the top driver for the wing's repeat/reoccur rates and that nose landing gear vibration made up 67 percent of these grounding items. The team then determined that was their burning platform and accomplished a root cause analysis to ensure their game plan addressed all the contributing factors that were adding fuel to the fire. In the end, the team concluded a fault-isolation manual was inadequate, the bearing retainer and bearings were corroded due to water intrusion around the seals, and axle spacer adapters were consistently found bad. As a result of this team's efforts, the data got to the engineers at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, where the depot's overhaul process ceased reusing spacer adapters and began simply replacing the critical part, and the fault isolation manual was rewritten. The numbers speak for themselves as Dover went from experiencing nineteen nose landing gear shimmy discrepancies during a 123-day period to experiencing only four discrepancies during the past 2 years. Our Port Dawgs also provide a recent example of Dover personnel striving to pursue excellence. One of the many highly visible expectations the Air Force has for our Aerial Port Squadron is for them to process and ship transportation priority-1, or TP-1 cargo within 24 hours 90 percent of the time. After observing Dover's average TP-1 rate around 77 percent during two consecutive quarterly briefings in 2013, the maintenance group put another team of subject matter experts together to determine why TP-1 cargo was not being processed timely enough in an effort to achieve the standard established by higher headquarters. After breaking down the problem and identifying performance gaps, it became clear to our aerial port experts that in-transit consolidation and cargo movement operating system, known as CMOS, errors were the top delayed processing indicators that sustained Dover's overall on time shipment rate 13 percent below the minimum threshold. After identifying human errors as the top driver in causing paperwork errors and CMOS kickbacks, this team of experts accomplished a root cause analysis in an effort to develop solutions to achieve their overall performance goal. The team discovered the owning work section had no standardized process on how to review paperwork from check-in through processing for shipment. There also was no process established for identifying a high priority cargo package upon receipt to packages readily identifiable. Lastly, it became quite apparent after applying Lean principles that the current shop layout did not have items stored at point of use, i.e., fast packs, prefabricated boxes, etc. After identifying the root causes that prevented our Super Port from having a realistic shot of obtaining their on-time processing goal, they brainstormed, applied Lean tools, and developed countermeasures to get them there. Some of these actions included simple and inexpensive actions such as: placing color coded painter's tape on TP-1 cargo, creating signage to clearly indentify the high priority cargo location, adding large rolling bins to separate priority cargo from all other cargo, creating a visual board that displays "in-checked kickbacks" for tracking, devising a checklist for checking in property, and developing a new single piece flow process layout that visibly identifies stations. The overall efforts of this rapid improvement event team helped Dover's monthly TP-1 cargo on time shipment rate average increase 11 percent and allowed the Aerial Port to exceed the standard threshold goal of 90 percent on a couple of occasions. These are just some of the great process improvement initiatives taking place right here at Dover Air Force Base. And AFSO or Lean is not just concepts for maintenance or manufacturing. For example, the Medical Group recently put a team together to address their current Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set metrics and improved their patient care by 25 percent. By educating the medical staff on HEDIS and their individual roles to improve Dover's HEDIS metrics, the medical group is aggressively pursuing improving the base's HEDIS score by eleven points so that our medical treatment facility will be considered among the best out of seventy-five facilities. The suitability of process improvement may vary across various functions, i.e., personnel in manufacturing, operations, and finance which emphasize reliability and efficiency, will generally relate to process improvement, while personnel in sales and marketing which emphasize relationships are less likely to embrace it. So why is sustained process improvement so rare? My observations lead me to believe there are several factors which mostly stem from turnover in organizational senior leadership. Competing demands, competing mindsets, and the pain of change are the key contributors that tend to get in the way of sustaining a great culture of process improvement. With these factors infringing on which process matters most, I've noticed that organizations that have the best process improvement programs and are able to sustain them have process improvement champions in place to help top leadership determine where, and where not, to focus attention. Since process improvement has to rise above other demands on senior leaders' time, its proponents have to clearly show why and where it is strategically important. Knowing when and where to improve processes is paramount, and it is essential to translate an organization's strategic plan into a process improvement strategy. In other words, what few activities out of hundreds will mean the difference between successful mission accomplishment and failure? Leaders and their process improvement proponents who are not able to do this place their organizations in danger. What are you doing to meet today--and tomorrow's challenges within your units?