Lean Thinking by Daniel T Jones & James P Womack

Author:Daniel T Jones & James P Womack [Jones, Daniel T & Womack, James P]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781439135952
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2010-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

F IGURE 8.6: P RATT & W HITNEY O RGANIZATION , 1994

F IGURE 8.7: P RATT & W HITNEY O RGANIZATION , 1996

The Module Centers will essentially be stand-alone businesses with vice president/general managers responsible for current production and for supporting the development of new products. Each Module Center will be able to completely engineer and fabricate one of the seven modules making up a jet engine: fans with their cases, low-pressure compressors, high-pressure compressors, combustors, high-pressure turbines, low-pressure turbines and nozzles, and nacelles and externals. These will be delivered at precisely the right time to the Assembly, Test, and Delivery Module, which will snap the engine together almost instantly and deal with the final customer.

At the same time this change is taking place (and there will no doubt be problems initially, just as there were in physical production), Pratt is rethinking sales and service. As product development lead times fall to perhaps two years and physical development times fall below the current target of four months, it will be necessary to eliminate the waves of sales, followed by droughts, which make it impossible to run Pratt on a level schedule even though end-user demand—that is, airline passenger miles—is very stable .

Lessons and Next Steps

What are the lessons of the Pratt experience for American managers who want to create lean organizations? The most obvious is to begin with what you do right now. Don’t think about what your workforce doesn’t know, their lack of education, or their age. Don’t think about the past obstructions of your union or the need for good quarterly “numbers.” These barriers exist mainly in your own head.

Instead, line up your value-creating activities in a continuous flow to improve quality while taking out large blocks of cost. This can be accomplished quickly if you have the knowledge—it has taken three years in the massive Pratt production system, which provides the toughest possible test—and it never requires significant sums for new equipment or plant. As costs fall, freeing up resources for new initiatives, it is much easier to see what to do next, including up-skilling your workforce. 39 Indeed, a fundamentally different cost structure for existing operations will often suggest a very different strategy from what would have been pursued if the old cost structure had been taken as a given. (Pratt, for example, could never have dreamed of competing in the engine overhaul business with its pre-1992 cost structure.)

For Pratt, of course, the effort to convert to lean principles is still only part of the way along. Physical operations have been dramatically transformed but product development is only now being revamped and the marketing and sales system are still to be made lean.

Even when this is done, strategic issues will remain of whether the aircraft engine business itself is viable and how the company will need to deploy its activities around the world to better correspond with its markets of sale. 40 One promising path is to rethink whether Pratt is in a product or service

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