In posting Part 326 I laid the foundation of
an actual case study of a Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul contractor to one of
the Department of Defense (DoD) military installations. The primary purpose of this DoD entity was to
train future aviators, how to fly a variety of different helicopters. In this posting we will “dig deeper” into how
we were able to turn this contractor around in terms of on-time completions of
flyable aircraft. As I stated in my last
posting, because of the sensitive nature of this business, I will code data in
terms of actual cycle time and rather use percentage improvements.
The way this contractor makes money is to maintain
a variety of rotary-wing aircraft to a fixed contract that calls for “x” amount
of aircraft to be available to this military training school. And as I said in
my last posting, this contractor was clearly underperforming. They were also spending quite a bit of money
on overtime in their attempt to complete the maintenance on these aircraft. Because they were underperforming, they were
forced to pay significant financial penalties which was rapidly eroding their
profitability. The first area I want to
discuss is how this contractor was scheduling their aircraft through their scheduled
maintenance process.
Since the contractor considered each new aircraft
an individual project, they were using a hybrid version of a traditional
project management software to schedule the sequence of how the aircraft should
be maintained. Because each aircraft
must go through the scheduled maintenance process after using an allotted
number of flying hours (e.g. 1,000 hours), this contractor was starting the
aircraft immediately because they believed that by starting an aircraft sooner,
they would finish it sooner. So, in
effect, this contractor was “pushing” aircraft into their scheduled maintenance
process. As a result, there was an
excessive amount of aircraft waiting to enter the maintenance hangar. Remember,
all of these aircraft waiting to enter the hangar were unflyable which reduced
the pool of acceptable aircraft available for the student pilots.
There were other problems facing this
contractor, not the least of which were part’s “stock-outs” needed to complete
the scheduled maintenance on the aircraft.
In addition, as I mentioned earlier, this contractor was using excessive
amounts of overtime and even sub-contracting aircraft outside in an attempt to
increase the number of flyable aircraft.
In fact, this contractor’s on-time completion rate was right around 60
percent with no apparent way to improve it.
It was clear to everyone that there was a significant lack of
synchronization of aircraft through this maintenance process.
As I said, this contractor
treated each aircraft as an individual project and if you asked the If you
asked the project managers why their project aircraft were late, the common
response was to blame everything on things they had no control over. That is, uncertainty or the Murphy bug was
the culprit. For example, if a part
comes in late from one of the back shops, or there was absenteeism, then these
could be the reasons why the aircraft was late.
When this contractor
developed their project management plans for the aircraft to be maintained,
numerous individual sequenced tasks were listed with individual task durations
listed. Each task time was estimated by
the maintenance group and “safety times” were added to each one just in case
the Murphy bug hit. Most of the time,
these safety times were 50 % of the total duration of the scheduled tasks. So you have to ask yourself, why, with a 50%
safety margin imbedded in each task, were the projects still coming in late 60%
of the time? I mean, with all of this safety
added to each task, shouldn’t they be completed at a higher rate than 60%? After an aircraft was completed, this
contractor had “After Action Reviews” to discuss what worked well and what didn’t
work well and in almost every case, things they had no control over was reported
as the reason it was late.
The contractor measured progress on
each project as the aircraft was being maintained by measuring the number of
tasks completed against the total number of tasks to be completed and then
calculated a percentage of tasks completed.
What they typically observed was that the first 90% of the project
seemed to move along quite well, but the remaining 10% dragged on endlessly. This is not uncommon when organizations use a
project management known as the Critical Path Method (CPM) and this contractor
was using their own version of this method.
Ninety percent of the project managers around
the world are using the same method and if you ask a typical project manager
about the factors that delayed a project, most will tell you that something
they didn’t expect, or had no control over cropped up in some of the tasks and
caused a delay. In other words, uncertainty or the Murphy bug bit them. Every project from virtually every environment
has uncertainty associated with it and how this uncertainty is dealt with
determines the ultimate success or failure of the project. So in order for a
project to be successful, there must be a way to protect it from uncertainty.
In my next posting we’ll look at how this MRO
contractor discovered how to protect their projects from uncertainty and how
they had begun to significantly reduce the time required to get aircraft
through their scheduled maintenance process faster and more reliably.
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