Is that knowledge beginning to percolate into the management ranks at Warner Robins?
Haines: Absolutely, dramatically. We’re getting a lot of movement and a lot of enthusiasm. We are fortunate in that we have some good benchmarks within the organization now so we can show people the befores and the afters and the dramatic changes as a result of implementing lean. Q: What are some of your success stories? Haines: The F-15 wing constitutes almost half of the man-hours and the cost of an F-15 depot maintenance program because it has to be literally completely rebuilt. The scheduled time to do that in order to meet the airplane flow is 37 days. A year and a half ago when we started with lean, we were on a seven-day-a-week, three-shift operation and still could not meet the production-line requirement. So the Air Force’s F-15 system program manager who runs the whole worldwide support system was looking for a second source for F-15 wings with the idea of starting them up and if they did better work than us, they would move a lot of it to that organic facility. Today, we’re
