Everyone who considers dieting needs a compelling reason, be it physical or more intangible. The same applies for the aerospace industry. The drive to eliminate wasted time and effort which currently has the industry in its grip, and which is at the heart of lean manufacturing, has gained its urgency because of the very different production challenges facing the civil and military aircraft sectors.
While airliner manufacturers are having trouble digesting the inflow of new orders, fighter builders are slimming down to a size at which they can survive on a starvation diet of few new programmes.
Coping with both extremes requires the same fundamental solution - become more efficient. That is what lean manufacturing is all about, and correctly implemented it will help Boeing build thousands of airliners profitably in the same way that it will help Lockheed Martin keep the F-16 line running and making money at today's dramatically reduced production rates.
Lean has been around for a while. It evolved by necessity during the Second World War, when the elimination of wasted time and effort was the only way to achieve the production rates required to achieve the production rates needed to meet the demands of war.
Today's incarnation of lean manufacturing has its origins in the highly efficient production system developed by Japanese car manufacturer Toyota. Dubbed "the machine that changed the world", the Toyota Production System has transformed the US automobile industry into one of the most efficient in the world.
The US aerospace industry started looking at the concept in the early 1990s, under the government-backed Lean Aircraft Initiative. That it has taken until almost the end of the decade for the result to begin to be see can be traced back to the dieting analogy - no-one diets seriously unless they have an urgent need to lose weight.
That urgent need now has the aerospace industry in its grip. Profitability, and therefore shareholder value, is at stake. Whether their orderbooks are fat or thin, manufacturers see the urgent need to become more efficient. They recognise the need to get lean - and mean it.
The road to lean is not straight. It requires a massive change in direction for an industry that is distinguished by its long adherence to traditions, in part because of the long lives of its products. Many aircraft are still built basically the same way that aircraft were built half a century ago. The adoption of new manufacturing techniques has been slow and has usually required the justification of a new programme to make the change worthwhile - and new programmes are now fewer and further apart.
That is no longer true. Manufacturers do not shrink now from introducing change in the middle of a production run if it makes the aircraft cheaper and quicker to produce. This is one major change from the lean days of the Second World War when, to achieve the rates required, aircraft were stamped out of a mould and changes made afterwards so as not to interrupt the production flow.
What has changed is that manufacturers have realised that to be lean, and therefore profitable, they must focus on what they do well. The Boeings and Lockheed Martins of the industry no longer bend metal and rivet details efficiently, so there is no point investing time and money in re-engineering those processes - it is better to outsource them to low-overhead suppliers. What the big manufacturers are good at is machining critical parts, integrating systems and final assembly.
The drive to be lean, therefore, presents a tremendous opportunity for growth for the supplier tiers. It also presents a tremendous challenge, as illustrated by Boeing's battle to bring parts shortages under control while simultaneously ramping up production to record levels.
What lean manufacturing really does is shift the inefficiencies, as well as the opportunities, to the suppliers. If the suppliers themselves do not become lean, they could buckle under the load that manufacturers want to place on them. It is as critical, therefore, for a "mom and pop" metal-bending backshop to be efficient and profitable as it is for a second-tier system supplier, or they will not survive. If one diets, all must diet if the industry as a whole is to prosper.
Source: Flight International
