“The C-5 is a challenge because of its size,” one of the depot’s test team leaders said. The Air Force’s C-5 Galaxy transports came to Warner Robins Air Logistics Center in Georgia for programmed depot maintenance, a top-to-bottom overhaul. In April 2004 an Air Force Materiel Command analyst said that at one point nearly half the fleet had been tied up in that overhaul at Robins.
The depot had already been working on the delay. At the end of fiscal 2003, a C-5 overhaul took 269 days on average. Lean projects had brought it to 226 by the spring of 2004. The country was at war, and some aircraft models, as a later paper on the project put it, were “in short supply.”
In 2005 the depot added something to its Lean work. It adopted Critical Chain, a project management method, on the C-5 line. The paper says the change took eight months “without using any additional resources.” Its most visible move ran against instinct. “We have reduced our work in progress from 12 to seven jets,” the C-5 production section chief said, “which allows us to use the same number of technicians to work fewer C-5s simultaneously.” Software called Concerto showed each aircraft, its tasks and their status, with task lists color-coded by urgency.
On 3 February 2006, a C-5B left the depot for Travis Air Force Base after a record-low 159 days. The depot’s previous record had been 171 days; the year before, the same work had taken more than 200. The functional test team finished its checks in five days instead of the usual ten. “We had a Lean event about three years ago, but we still didn’t meet our schedule,” said the supervisor of the shop that rebuilt the engine cowlings. About a third of each cowling was a bonded part his shop didn’t repair, and getting those back in time had been the problem. A second Lean event in March 2005 found it was easier to manufacture those parts than to repair them. His shop was now turning out 22 cowlings a month and had greatly reduced its back orders. Keeping up the pace, the production section chief said, rested on “a combination of CCPM and Lean.”
In May 2006 the project won the Franz Edelman Award, a prize for operations research. According to the award announcements, the number of C-5s in the depot fell from twelve to seven in eight months (one Air Force article said thirteen), overhaul time fell by 33 percent, and five more aircraft returned to service, generating, by the entry’s estimate, at least $49.8 million a year in additional revenue. The entry was presented by depot officials, a University of Tennessee professor, and a vice president of Realization Technologies, a software provider.
Not everyone was sold. When the depot planned to bring the method to its C-130 overhauls, Air & Space Forces Magazine reported in January 2006, citing the local Macon Telegraph, some C-130 maintainers were unhappy, pointing to the age of their aircraft and the wear of current operations.