Stacks of Wings

One of the eight wastes in Lean is having excess Inventory, and it’s one that I find many people I work with struggle to understand. Perhaps because a lot of my work as been in service industries or the military. The military especially doesn’t get it. Many in the military love to have secret caches of stuff. Having been a commander of a Supply unit, I know that for a fact. My favorite instance of squirelling stuff away came up when I helped the Civil Engineering Squadron do a 5S event of their warehouse, where we came across a 1940’s air conditioner compressor they were holding onto, “just in case.” (Read all about it in earlier article I Love 5S)

But the most egregious story I’ve heard about excess inventory came from my time at Warner-Robins Air Force Base. The base is one of a handful of repair depots for the Air Force. One of the planes the repaired and refurbished was the venerable F-15 Eagle fighter. They could do everything from replacing a knob on the radio to rebuilding the entire aircraft. As such they had a large cache of parts and supplies. My Lean Facilitator colleague, David, used to be part of the F-15 repair team.

One day David went to lunch with his old team. We had a meeting after lunch to plan an upcoming Lean training class. As we went through material David began to chuckle a bit when we were talking about the wastes. He shared with me that the guys on his old team told him how they were running out of space for the spare F-15 wings. I didn’t understand, so he explained.

The shop had just completed another set of spare wings to be used for future F-15 refurbishments. They now had a total 16 sets of wings. The storage area they had was full, so David told me how they were stacking the wings in the hanger used to work on the C-130 cargo planes. Which was pissing the C-130 guys off, because they had to move the large portable stands used to work on the aircraft outside of the hanger to make room. They then had to spend extra time moving the stands in and out as they needed them.

The situation was not going away anytime soon. The center averaged about 5 refurbishments a years that required wings. So the shop had over 3 years of inventory on hand.

As David told me all this, we began to tally up the costs that this was incurring, and it was quite a list:

·?????? Inventory Carrying Cost: The money tied up in the stack of wings.

·?????? Opportunity Costs: The teams working on the excess wings could be working on other items.

·?????? Excess container costs: The spare wings needed protection, wooden crates needed to be built. With labor, these could be thousands of dollars.

·?????? Transportation Waste: Having to store them in hangers meant time and energy (hence money) had to be spent moving things around. Not only the wings, but the C-130 stands and other items.

·?????? Recertification Costs: Once refurbished, the wings had a shelf life of 6 months. After that, they needed to be checked to see they were still good.

We didn’t have the information to calculate a hard dollar amount to all the costs, but it was clear it was quite a bit. There was also the implication of inefficient project planning and lack of lean principles. It was clear that they were not using a pull system. It called into question what other wastes were going on with the center.

David and I contemplated trying to bring our concerns to somebody, but decided against it for two reasons. First, we belongs to the Reserve Command unit at Warner-Robins; a completely different organization than the Logistic Center. It would be like Ford telling Apple their production line had issues. Second, the reason David was chuckling over all this to be begin with, was that the Shop doing the wings had just received a commendation for their outstanding work as evident by their high rate of production. With that leadership mindset, we knew our voices would not be heard.

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