Lean makes Parker visibly better

Parker Aerospace's plant in Irvine, Calif., got a facelift by implementing a host of very visual lean manufacturing tools

Irvine, Calif., is a short drive south from Los Angeles and Hollywood, so you’ll have to excuse local industrial giant Parker Aerospace for being so fixated on its looks.

In Southern California, it’s all about the visual, baby. It’s what keeps plastic surgeons, movie stars and Disneyland in business. It’s what put a former Mr. Universe in the governor’s mansion.

Parker Aerospace is a SoCal stunner, and like many, its status was aided by a visual enhancement procedure. Parker went trendy, but eschewed Lasik, Botox, liposuction and implants for lean manufacturing practices.

By utilizing a host of lean’s visual management tools, this large plant earned rave reviews from customers and its corporate office and became a pinup model for aspiring plant stars.

This Irvine facility and its future truly look mah-velous.

The off ramp to progress
Parker Aerospace’s Irvine plant wasn’t always a hottie. Like many U.S. industrial sites, it was up to its eyeballs in inventory and waste. Production areas were as congested as the I-5 at rush hour. Processes rambled on like an Oscar acceptance speech.

But that changed and continues to change. The plant began to adopt lean practices in the 1990s, and the implementation accelerated over the past three years. 

With the help of exceptionally visual lean tools such as cells, value stream maps, tracking center boards, kitting, kanban and tooling carts, the plant today can boast of greatly reduced turnaround time, inventory, floor space, work-in-progress and variation, and greatly increased productivity, throughput, repeatability and customer service.

These results are extremely important as pricing pressures, increased customer expectations and global competition create major flux in the aerospace component industry.

“Are you in survival mode?” Matt Furlan, an operations director, playfully asks Don Wells, a Continuous Improvement manager.

“We’re all in survival mode,” replies Wells. “Lean is a good way to ensure that we survive in the market.”

Moving in together
One of the most visual signs of lean’s goodness at Parker Aerospace is the fact that Wells’ Control Systems Division (CSD) and Furlan’s Customer Support Operations (CSO) exist in the same building.

CSD is on the original equipment manufacturing side of the business. It makes primary flight control actuation and other hydraulic systems and components for military and commercial aircraft customers. CSO is the business wing that provides aftermarket support for Parker Aerospace products through repair, maintenance and spares.

Five years ago, CSD encompassed the entire 370,000-square-foot Irvine facility. The CSO facility was located 10 miles away.

During a period of consolidation, CSD freed up approximately 50 percent of its floor space through kaizen-type workshops, inventory-reduction events, 5-S cleaning projects and a full conversion to a cellular layout. CSO moved into the building in August 2000.

“We’ve shrunk our space, but not the CSD business,” says Randy Irvin, manufacturing operations team leader. “In fact, we’ve doubled our sales over the last few years.”

CSO made the most of its move.

“It was a fresh start for us,” says Continuous Improvement director Curt Williams. “At our old facility, everything was monumented into place. We literally cut the cords.”

CSO installed electrical soft drops from the ceiling and taped up the floor to denote the location of new cells. That prep work enabled the division’s machining operations
to be up and running 72 hours after moving from the former site. Today, the equipment is completely modular and can be easily reconfigured to meet changing customer and product requirements.

Green, yellow and red
Going cellular, though, was just the beginning. Value stream maps tacked to tracking center boards around the plant inform all who pass by that floor layout
opportunities remain. During mapping events that are held every few months, employees analyze material and information flow in order to identify non-value activity and process steps.

“We take a high-volume representative part number and go through every detail of every step on a value stream map,” says Wells. “We track how long each operation takes. We also color-code each step to denote whether the operation is a value-creating or non-value-creating step and whether we have control if it’s a non-value-creating step. 

“If it’s a green circle, that’s value-creating. There are no flags or alarms there. Yellow is Type 1 waste, the kind we can’t easily eliminate. For example, in aerospace, everything gets tested. There’s nothing we can do about it. Red, or Type 2, waste is avoidable. We used to walk from one end of the building to the other because that’s where the stress-relieving oven was located. We acknowledged that we had to buy an oven or move one up here. We saved 7,000 to 8,000 feet by bringing an oven to the work area. 

“Do we have control? Does it make sense to do it? Those are the questions we ask ourselves.”

Value stream update events chart progress toward addressing action plans from the previous event. The goal is to transform the current state into the future state.

Besides value stream maps, tracking center boards also trace key cell, value stream and plant statistics for safety, quality, delivery, lead time and cost. Pareto charts
list problems/opportunities and resulting countermeasures.

Picture this
The lean tools get even more visual when you enter a cell.

Operator technicians used to receive text-heavy sheets that provided assembly or repair instructions. Today, process sheets include full-color pictures and captions that take operators step by step through a task.

“This standardized our work instructions and greatly reduced variation,” says Williams. “This ensures we are analyzing, assembling or disassembling a component the right way every time.”

Pictures also document the progress of improvement projects (the power of “before” and “after” photos) and give a pat on the back to work done by team members.

“We have digital cameras available on the shop floor,” says Beth Benz, CSO parts supply administrator. “People relate to pictures. They find creative ways to use them in conjunction with our lean efforts.”

Like a surgeon
Another great cell tool involves tool storage. In the past, hand tools and power tools used in production processes were kept in tool cribs or in individual tool boxes or lockers scattered around the plant.

A technician needing a tool had to leave the work area, which negatively impacted productivity.

Today, production tools are located in the cell on shadow boards or in cabinet drawers. Drawers have foam liners with cutouts to house specific tools. With boards and drawers, all tools are close at hand and it’s apparent when a tool is missing.

“We want the technician to be like a surgeon in an operating room,” says Williams. “Everything is there to do the procedure. You don’t want your surgeon leaving the operating room to get something he or she needs to do the job.”

Kitting and kanban
The Irvine plant also stresses focus and the elimination of wasted movement and time through the use of kits and kanban.

Kits are highly visual plastic totes that transport parts for assembly or refurbishment tasks. All parts get a specially designed compartment in the tote to eliminate searching, handling damage and processing time.

CSO introduced “80 percent kits” two years ago.

“We had to think differently with the way we brought materials into the system,” says Williams. “Before, the operator did the disassembling task, ordered the needed parts and waited 10 to 15 days to get them. Now, everything is immediately available for the technician through 80 percent kits. We create a kit for a given product based on historical data or forecasts.

“The technician pulls out what is needed from the kit. Whatever is taken out gets refilled by the stockroom. Not everything is in that kit. Some things with a high-dollar
price tag are never replaced or infrequently replaced. It would be too costly to hold all of those items.”

CSD thrives with “software kits.”

“This kit houses the soft items, things like O-rings,” says Wells. “In a kit for an actuator, we may have 150 parts that need assembling. Seventy-five to 100 of those parts could be $5-or-less items. Prior to this, when a need for parts arose, a requisition would be cut, a supplier found, an order placed, the part received, sent to inspection and receiving, entered into stock, taken out of stock, over and over. Now, one supplier furnishes all 75 or so items, collapses the bill of material and houses them all in one kit. It’s one part number vs. 75 or more.”

The savings are substantial.

“For each actuator assembly, we spent hours laying out and unwrapping those 75 parts,” says Wells. “Each part came in its own little bag. You took them all out, placed them in the right sequence, made sure the parts were OK and started assembling. This kit saves us hours every time we assemble an actuator.”

Kanban is another visual lifesaver.

In the past, CSD and CSO functioned in a batch, or push, environment. The goal was to make as much product as possible or to stockpile spares. This led to a glut of inventory and congestion on the plant floor.

“Racks were filled with inventory,” says Irvin. “The racks used to go up to the ceiling.”

Kanban helps turn batch into one-piece flow and push into pull.

“We only induct into the cell what we want them to produce on a daily basis,” says Williams. “For CSO jobs, as soon as they pull this job into the cell to tear it down,
the accompanying kanban card goes back to the storeroom as a signal to get me another job. For a cell, we only have two jobs staged at any one time.”

Kanban also works for consumable parts such as hardware.

“Our point-of-use bins have a bag of parts with a card in it. The bin also has loose parts,” says Steven Rivera, CSO scheduling team leader. “When the technician consumes the loose parts, he rips open the bag and dumps those parts in the bin. The card is picked up and goes to the stockroom. That signals for another bag to be delivered to the point of use.”

There’s no clearer way to check the parts level. Just look in the bin.

The fork in the road
Of great benefit to CSD has been parts presentation carts.

In the past, forklifts delivered crates of raw material from shelving racks down to the production area. When one machine finished the initial shaping process, the raw material would be crated by forklift over to the next area. 

When the forklift broke, CSD changed gears. Now, a pallet jack carries a crate over to the first machine. Then, the parts are placed in a mobile rack and wheeled to the next stage. After the final stage, the part is put in a foam-lined tote.

“It would have cost $15,000 to $20,000 to fix the forklift,” says Wells. “Instead of spending the money, we found a new way to focus on material handling.”

So visual, it talks
The end result of Parker Aerospace’s lean initiatives to date is a remarkably clean, smart, uncluttered plant. There is truly a place for everything and everything is in its place. An extreme example? Desks in one area of the production floor have areas taped off and dedicated to different stapler sizes.

This is a plant that talks to you. A visitor can walk the plant floor and, simply by looking around, assemble information about that day’s flow of product, takt time, inventory, whether or not production is on schedule and whether or not there are machinery issues. Examining the tracking center boards easily informs you about plant trends and how the site is matching up with goals and expectations.

“It’s very easy now to see waste and even easier to eliminate the waste,” says Rivera. “Lean is not a magic pill. It’s not like we took a pill and can now see things differently. You have to go out there and utilize some very simple tools. You have to interact with those around you. That leads to wins, and that gets the momentum going.”

Mark Twain, not exactly a Hollywood or L.A. guy, once opined that “all scenery in California requires distance to give it its highest charm.”

In the case of this Irvine plant, the closer you are to the scenery, the more you are charmed by its good looks and by great lean ideas.

Parker Aerospace will present a case study at MRO Today's Lean Manufacturing University 2 conference in Cleveland.

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