Boeing boss is keen for lean ways, production on a smaller scale

While Everett awaits Boeing's momentous 7E7 final assembly decision, plants in Auburn and Frederickson, Pierce County, are already assured of a chunk of the new airplane's manufacturing.

Ask Boeing managers what's the cutting edge of those aircraft-parts factories and they won't point to one of the gigantic milling machines.

Instead, the state-of-the-art in Boeing's manufacturing is a Japanese-flavored philosophy. Boeing managers breathe it. They name it in a single word, used as both adjective and noun.

Lean.

At a time of massive layoffs and transfer of work overseas, Boeing factory workers are sometimes cynical about this management religion, dubbing lean an acronym for "Less Employees Are Needed."

Particularly at Auburn, where the plant is dramatically shrinking as entire buildings are emptied, lean is a hard sell in these meanest of economic times.

Liz Otis, vice president of Boeing's Fabrication Division, must wish company marketers had come up with a better name.

For inside the plants, the lean-manufacturing philosophy flourishes as a surprisingly human-scale force for innovation.

Running both factories — and also responsible for Boeing's plant in Portland, another in Salt Lake City and two more in Canada — Otis pushes lean initiatives in the current downturn as all the more crucial to Boeing's survival.

Her message: The contraction is healthy, the outsourcing is necessary, and lean is making Boeing stronger.

"This is a trough, but our future is bright," Otis insisted. "And what we do is very special."

What lean means

Otis' Fabrication Division does some of the most sophisticated manufacturing work in the Boeing company.

In Auburn, a worker in full-body metallic protective gear looks like a cross between some 1970s glam rock star and an astronaut as he loads a titanium sheet inside a mold into an oven heated to 1,650 degrees Fahrenheit in a process called superplastic forming.

In Frederickson, long, low automated trolleys move around on their own power, guided by metal ribbons in the floor, and deliver carbon fiber and plastic composite structures right into the heart of giant pressure ovens, or autoclaves.

Lean is an approach to organizing the work that transcends all the high-tech techniques.

Lean comes courtesy of Toyota. Boeing works with Japanese consulting firm Shingijutsu, which has developed instructional methods based on Toyota's auto-production processes.

Boeing executives, production engineers and even selected mechanics make regular trips to Japan to hone their understanding of how to create lean efficiencies that cut inventory, cycle time, factory space, waste and unnecessary material movement.

In all the factories, small groups of design engineers and production workers — known as a moonshine teams for their improvisational skills — devote their days to finding leaner ways to make airplane parts: that is, better, smaller-scale and cheaper.

In Auburn, one team gathers around what it calls a "chaku-chaku" cell, eager to show off a project that encompasses many lean elements: single piece flow (make a single part at a time, not a batch of 50); easy exchange of the dies that hold the parts; right-size machines; rapid prototyping.

So far, the engineers have built a mock-up of some machinery out of wood and cardboard. They've also used plastic bottles, ballpoint pens and a waffle iron.

"One of the really neat things for our employees working on this stuff," Otis had said earlier, "is that it's like coming to a toy store every day."

Yet this play is completely serious. The team is designing from scratch a semicircular cell of small machines that will replace a process currently spread around the factory on various behemoth machines.

The aim is to allow a single worker to efficiently produce the part just when needed, in the right quantities, and with the quality of the end product checked during the process.

The upshot, at this mock-up phase, is four stations: a water jet to cut the part from a titanium blank; an edge blast to finish the edges; a de-burr to rub off jagged slivers; and a hot forming press to shape the piece.

Each prototype machine is sized so one man can comfortably operate it.

As each machine finishes its job, it spits the piece of metal out and the operator loads it onto the next machine. Chaku-chaku is Japanese for load-load. The operator never has to undo a clamp and unload; he just lifts the piece and puts it in place at the next station.

A quality check sits between each of the stations, testing for fit the precise contours and dimensions of the hardware so that problems are apparent immediately.

Ten months from now when the cell is perfected and the stations are re-created in hard metal, the project will translate into a worker's day spent humming along: maintaining four different machines and doing the quality checks, making a single part from start to finish.

Charlie Chaplin's 1936 movie "Modern Times" depicts the worker as a tiny cog in a factory machine, his work no more uplifting than an endlessly repeated half-turn of a wrench.

In contrast to that industrial nightmare, the chaku-chaku cell is meticulously designed to make it easy for the human operator to perform and to allow autonomy and control of the entire process from raw material to finished part.

One manager calls it "automation with a human touch."

In Auburn, 42 finished lean cells are already in operation, transforming the factory floor. Huge machines used to be clustered together according to their different functions, with parts traveling around the plant for one operation after another.

Gradually, floor space is clearing and smaller cells are taking up the work.

Toughing it out

Such innovation, by simplifying complex tasks that previously required Boeing expertise, can lead to work going out the door to suppliers.

In March, Otis announced the elimination of some 400 fabrication jobs this year, out of a total workforce of some 8,000, the result of such outsourcing.

In addition, many jobs are moving around. Wing work previously done in Auburn is being consolidated in Frederickson. An additional 100 complex machining jobs are moving from Auburn to Portland and, depending on production rates, some portion of those could become job cuts.

Large pieces of property have already been sold at Auburn and more are to come, reducing the current plant footprint from 7 million square feet to around 4.5 million by 2005.

Otis insists that core work will always be preserved: the complex and sophisticated work, the ability to innovate and improvise, the capability to quickly do emergency jobs, the ability to fill in anywhere when production rates surge.

"That's what we'll maintain," Otis said. "These things are absolutely critical to Boeing."

Otis, 53, who rises every day before the crack of dawn to commute from her Vashon Island farm to Auburn, seems tough enough for the challenge of leading a workforce weary of easy assurances.

Her father died before she was 12 and, with money tight, she took a U.S. Army grant to finish her liberal-arts degree at an all-women's college in upstate New York. Afterward, she joined up, and at 23 became the first woman to get a combat-support command.

"It was 450 guys and me," she recalled. "The first sergeant had never worked with a woman, much less for one."

On her first day, right after the change-of-command ceremony, ugly racial fights broke out among her troops. Otis chose not to call the MPs but walked right into the middle of a group of angry African-American soldiers, their fists defiantly raised in Black Power salutes. Otis calmed them down and broke up what was threatening to become a race riot.

Otis has conquered Boeing's traditionally male preserve with similar nerve and effort.

"Occasionally in my career I felt I had to create electricity when I walked into a room," she said, "I couldn't just turn on a light switch."

To lead her people through the current downturn, Otis speaks of tapping the emotional resilience within herself to remain optimistic and focused on the longer term.

Her focus isn't shifting. The Fabrication Division will stay on the path to lean.

Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or dgates@seattletimes.com