Lean FIGHTER

Manufacturing Engineering, Mar 2005 by Waurzyniak, Patrick

How Boeing's lean manufacturing team cut costs, cycle times on the F/A-22 Raptor stealth fighter program

Aerospace manufacturers face constant pressures to control costs and ensure quality on mission-critical projects while keeping defense programs on track to meet stringent delivery schedules. Faced with tough choices, The Boeing Co. (Chicago) implemented a lean manufacturing program on its project to build the airplane wings and aft fuselage for the US Air Force's next-generation F/A-22 Raptor fighter/attack aircraft, leading to dramatic improvements in cost reductions and cycle times in building those key components for the new stealth fighter plane scheduled to begin service later this year.

With Boeing's lean manufacturing effort, the aerospace giant was able to gain dramatic reductions in both costs and cycle times, boosting productivity and efficiency on its portion of the contract to build the Raptor, the air-superiority successor to the US Air Force F-15 Eagle fighter. Boeing builds the Raptor's wings and aft fuselage, key components with advanced aerodynamic designs and crucial fuel delivery and controls systems.

The F/A-22 Raptor fighter program is shared by several aerospace manufacturers, with Lockheed Martin Corp. (Bethesda, MD) and Boeing being the major contractors, along with aircraft engine supplier Pratt & Whitney (East Hartford, CT), machining supplier GKN (St. Louis), and other subcontractors. Lockheed and Boeing as primary contractors own 67.5% and 32.5%, respectively, of the overall project, and Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co. plants in Marietta, GA, and Fort Worth, TX, assemble the other major pieces of the aircraft with the jet fighter's final assembly at Lockheed's Marietta facilities.

Lean manufacturing methodologies deployed by Boeing on its Raptor fighter effort included value-stream mapping, high-performance work teams, determinant assembly, and extensive use of an advanced lean manufacturing technique called 3P, Production Preparation Process. Construction of the Raptor wings and aft fuselage takes place at the Boeing Integrated Defense Systems (IDS) Developmental Center, a 710,000 ft^sup 2^ (66,030 m^sup 2^) manufacturing facility in Seattle. The facility features large areas for composite fabrication, development prototypes, test labs, quality assurance, and emergent manufacturing, which includes sheet-metal fabrication, tooling, machining, and a tube shop, and it houses the 180,000 ft^sup 2^ (16,740 m^sup 2^) area where the F/A-22 wings and aft fuselage assemblies are built.

Key to Boeing's lean effort on the Raptor program was reducing, or even eliminating, the aircraft maker's huge monument tooling, the extremely large fixtures or jigs used to build large aero structures like airplane wings that typically require hundreds of costly, time-consuming crane moves. By implementing new lean techniques, Boeing's IDS manufacturing management was able to eliminate the large jigs for the aft fuselage construction, allowing for much more productive plant layout with improved product flow through the factory.

The Boeing F/A-22 lean program traces its roots to as far back as the late 1990s when Boeing was still grappling with issues traced to its acquisition of aerospace rival McDonnell-Douglas. The lean program started in early 2000, with initial efforts taking on a shotgun approach, putting out fires as needed, according to John C. Dickson, lean manager for the Boeing F/A-22 Raptor program, who notes: "It really started out as a product change-how do we make a product increase its velocity? Ninety percent of our time was focused on enhancing the product, enhancing the tooling, and now 90% of our time is on the people side of lean, which is everything."

Before implementing the lean program, Boeing managers devised a high-level plan on how t'o increase speed in the Raptor assembly before presenting it to the plant's workers. "We came up with a rough plan, we didn't have all the specifics, but this is where we really started getting our employees involved," Dickson recalls. "This is where the teams started sprouting up. We came from a culture of predominantly firefighting, reacting to fires that were burning. The questions were: 'How do we get more into fire prevention mode? How do we get people ahead of what was coming, and ensure those fires don't start burning?' We had to culturally take a whole group of people and let them focus on that with an innovative product team to define technically where we're going."

By 2001, the F/A-22 management team's lean leaders had crystallized its lean manufacturing philosophy into the Lean Vision 2005 program, which helped managers work with teams of mechanics to lay the groundwork for goals on a successful lean program. The Vision 2005 lean system has since been replaced with a Vision 2008 program, with updated goals for employees and management.

The Lean Vision 2005 plan, made into a poster for the factory floor for visualizing key lean concepts for reducing waste, included 6S (Sort, Simplify, Sweep, Standardize, Self-Discipline, Safety); 9 Tactics (Value Stream, Balance the Line, Standard Work, Visuals, Point of Use, Feeder, Breakthrough Redesign, Pulse Line, Moving Line); and Best Practices. Part of the lean effort also emphasizes pushing work back up the value stream, even back up to suppliers, following Boeing's moves to outsource much of its major metal machining, sheetmetal forming and fabricating to outside suppliers (see the article "A Look at Boeing's Outsourcing Strategy" in the March 2004 issue of Manufacturing Engineering.)