Jetrader - January/February 2011 - 19

Fixin’ the System
Lean/continual improvement in aircraft repair and maintenance at FedEx Express
By Patrick J. Doyle, Senior Manager of Hangar Maintenance at FedEx Express

When your career is to repair, modify and maintain large transport jet aircraft, your first reaction when someone suggests applying the Toyota Production System (TPS) methods to your business might be to wonder if they are speaking a foreign language. How can production line methods apply to an airline maintenance organization? After all, we perform a service—we don’t produce a product. But if you examine the TPS principles as described in The Toyota Way by Jeffery Liker, you’ll soon see the parallels. The production of a car for a customer and the production of an aircraft out of a maintenance visit share one unwavering reality: they are both a process. FedEx Express operates about 170 aircraft maintenance facilities worldwide that perform routine maintenance tasks, including about 100 stations in the United States. It’s in the sprawling maintenance hangars in Los Angeles, Memphis and Indianapolis that the company performs much of its major service work, including repairs, overhauls and equipment upgrades. The FedEx Express teams in these hangars must be prepared to replace or repair anything on any of the corporation’s 360 large cargo transport aircraft. During the recent sluggish economy, the FedEx Express maintenance personnel and staff of lean-trained aircraft maintenance technicians found ways to save money for the company by improving efﬁciencies and creating internal capacities. Lean/continual improvement helped them identify opportunities to remove waste and reﬁne maintenance operations, allowing them to in-source work previously done

by external vendors, which helped enhance job security.

Heavy Maintenance and Modiﬁcation Improvements
“You got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there,” said the great baseball catcher Yogi Berra. Most maintenance letter checks, like the B/C-check maintenance operations, are fairly predictable. You think you know where you’re going. The process plan usually requires opening, conducting required inspections, securing certain new parts, reassembly, operational checks and delivery. Excluding unexpected major repairs, the process usually goes fairly smoothly. Although most B/C-checks occur without problems, they are among the lengthiest processes that an aircraft maintenance organization performs; therefore, they present many opportunities for improvement. The ﬁrst step toward identifying those opportunities is to examine the current process. In the case of B/C-checks, that means different things at different

airlines, depending on the approved maintenance program and operational pull of the ﬂight demands. However the checks are deﬁned within a particular airline, it is essential that the work ﬂow that is created includes speciﬁc milestones and way points. Otherwise, the process is similar to driving in a new place without a map— you will get there eventually, but you will retrace your steps, have many false starts, and waste time and effort. At FedEx Express, we mapped out our check work ﬂow and our C-checks. For example, we identiﬁed 68 milestones, or key aspects of the overall process, which we segmented into four-hour increments. Within each four-hour block, technicians hand off assignments at precise points that are clearly communicated so one technician can pick up a task exactly where his predecessor on the last shift left off. As the process for C-checks was being deﬁned at FedEx Express, every item was evaluated to identify constraints and nonvalue-added time. The end result was the continued on page 22 Jetrader 19

Jetrader - January/February 2011

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