Airbus flies lean thinking on wireless technology

Mobile technology is stripping vast amounts of waste and time out of wing designer and manufacturer Airbus UK's materials management and logistics. In fact, the company says it achieved full return on its IT investment within weeks of implementing systems – and is now set to take a much wider wireless initiative a great deal further. It's all part of Airbus UK's Route '06 programme, which is examining all site processes and procedures to look for and adopt productivity gains and cost savings by next year. David Herbert, business improvement change agent in Airbus' planning and logistics department in Filton, says it's founded squarely on lean thinking, but adapted for the aerospace sector and the site's rhythm, which he describes as being around building one plane a day. "A plane-a-day sets the scene for all of our planning and logistics and focuses the mind on what our key objectives are," he says. "Learning from the automotive industry we have been taking as much waste out of our business as possible as well as constantly improving product quality. Clearly, we cannot compromise our products' engineering integrity, but we can look for improvements in the material flows and logistics around our manufacturing procedures and business processes throughout our diverse operations." Herbert started with mobile technology in stock auditing. "Stock takes are notoriously hard to get a handle on, and WIP [work in progress] in particular," he observes. And since Airbus was auditing WIP manually three or four times a year, typically taking 20 people and 100 man-hours at overtime rates, it was time consuming and expensive. Last year, Peak Technologies supplied Symbol mobile hand-held terminals, and the result of scanning and uploading data to the site SAP system was a transformation. "Now a site count can be carried out in an afternoon in just 20 man-hours, with no disruption to production. Mobile hand-held terminals allow us to achieve rapid counts and WIP audits in critical areas are now common, with instantly available data, which in turn updates the inventory records held by our SAP system. I reckon we saved the cost of that equipment in the first WIP audit." Hide and seek Herbert concedes that the scale of saving here is particularly high simply because in the aerospace sector traceability of all stock is so critical throughout manufacturing and assembly. But he says it's been an eye opener for further projects using wireless technology that could have excellent ramifications applicable to most industrial sectors. "It was quickly recognised that our treatments facility – which does cleaning, crack detection, surface conditioning, heat treatment, plating, masking and painting – in particular could benefit," says Herbert. "Whilst all jobs have a process order number, traceability has always been complex there. "Each week we process around 30,000 parts, equivalent to 800 orders. They're fed to the treatment shop by four business units – a large machine shop, press shops and the fabricating shop – onto two carousels, one for large items, the other for small. We have to manage items as large as ribs for the wing structures and as small as washers. Difficulties arise with the medium sized items since 50% of the jobs can be routed onto either carousel depending on workload, and there are time constraints between processes. So tracing components' whereabouts becomes particularly complex at that point." Inevitably there are slippages due to machines down, quality issues and all the usual reasons that MRP doesn't recognise, so Airbus had an 'urgent job find' procedure, which previously relied upon a shop scheduler locating an urgent job by visual inspection of all process orders in the carousel area – normally 500 at any one time. "In reality, this meant that people had to manually cross-check the jobs in the treatment facility against a SAP produced hard copy shortage report. We used to have four shop schedulers doing it. After a while they could become number blind and rarely were all urgent jobs identified in one search," says Herbert. "It was crying out for our hand-held technology." Airbus needed some bespoke software to get a feedback loop working with SAP for the urgent job dump. Peak delivered that using its MCL rapid application development tool which is geared to developing, debugging and deploying Auto ID systems. "Now the shop scheduler downloads the jobs that have become urgent from SAP onto a PC and then into the hand-held terminal. He then enters the treatment facility and scans all of the jobs' barcodes. As an urgent one is identified it bleeps, alerting the shop scheduler, and allows us to bring work to the front of the queue and upload what's been done into SAP. It means we can do that whole job in two or three hours, which is a huge improvement. "It's taken out about 70–80% of the time we used to spend in expediting. And it's improved morale enormously. These are intelligent, time served engineers. Now they can dedicate their time to planning and managing the shops better, which improves things from the front end. For example, in the treatment shop, we drive everything by work-to lists, and those can now be refreshed from business unit to business unit. "We used to have to assume that the sequence of jobs would be right from the earlier processes, so we operated work in subsequent shops on a FIFO [first in, first out] basis. But it doesn't always work like that: sequences get distorted because of the transfer methods and downtime, for example. So refreshing the work-to lists brings much better management, and we're using the hand-helds to help improve that too." So far so good, but Herbert sees this as just the beginning. "The thinking now is that with mobile technology there are all sorts of other opportunities for eliminating waste. Our next pilot will be to cut out the double handling between shops, using mobile carriers to transfer WIP: then if we create a wireless infrastructure across the site and classify the mobile stores in our SAP production system, we'll also be able to track and trace material movements automatically in areas that are currently gaps in our knowledge. SAP will know where the parts are at all times. "Phase Two of that will be to track each of the jobs themselves down to the order level. For example, not all material recording is as simple as goods receiving; there can be a lot of exceptions and different actions are required. At the moment, SAP is accessed by production control people on their PCs, but because they're at fixed locations, everyone has to take printouts with them, write notes and key in entries when they return. "With our wireless infrastructure, we could use thin client Tablets that run SAP talking to local Cisco access points and a server running Citrix – and they could do all the tracking and data entry as they go." And that's the plan: Hitachi Tablet PCs as well as the hand-helds, implemented by Airbus' in-house IT people and CSC on a WiFi 802.11b wireless LAN. "We'll then use the wireless infrastructure to attack more waste: for example, no more paper printouts; you do the transactions directly onto the system. Tablets are more flexible than conventional hand-helds, and that will help with the huge variety of jobs and transactions we would like to record. We'll be looking at tools for all our 50 or so shop schedulers." Some change.