By Vicky Falcón
NAVAIR Public Affairs

Interns (or summer hires) are as much a part of the summer season as vacations at the beach and picnics in the park. But the process of hiring these short-term workers has been no picnic for the folks at NAVAIR Depot Cherry Point where the application process alone had become cumbersome and ambiguous.

Last January representatives from the depot’s Human Resources Office, Human Resource Service Center East (their regional HRO), Research and Engineering Department (4.0) and the 4.0 Competency Manager took advantage of NAVAIR AIRSpeed tools to create a Summer Hire Process Improvement Kaizen Project with a goal of streamlining the process and reducing costs. The benefits are paying off already.

“We knew we could improve the process – there wasn’t even a documented process to start with,” said Kathy Ratliff, Recruiting, Retention and Career Development Specialist within 4.0. “During our Kaizen event we spent the day laying out the step-by-step process for hiring summer workers. Then we looked for unnecessary steps and began eliminating them.”

Roles and responsibilities for those involved in the hiring process were also clearly defined during the Kaizen event, said Ratliff, and a method for getting feedback from “customers” was implemented.

Instead of an unwieldy, disorganized 24-step process, the summer hire program was streamlined to just four steps – and a feedback mechanism was added to receive customer input and rate their satisfaction.

The process has resulted in significant savings. What used to consume 4000 man-hours now takes just 648, and the cost of hiring an intern dropped from $12,800 per person, to just $980.

Those savings allowed the summer hire program to take on five more interns than was funded last year.

Russell Padgett, team lead for V-22 FST/ 4.1.1, was able to hire an additional intern this summer, and is very happy with the improvements he’s seen.

“The program is running much smoother and required less work on my part – which is always a good thing,” said Padgett. “In the past it tended to be very disorganized – even chaotic. This year it was cut-and-dry. It was simple and straight-forward.”

Padgett says he’s especially pleased with the savings. “Saving money is always a good thing,” he said. “This will allow me to ‘buy’ more summer help in the future.”

Padgett isn’t the only manager who is impressed with the program’s changes. With the new feedback channels in place, the team’s goal was to see a 95% customer satisfaction rating. So far, they’ve got 100% satisfaction.

“I’ve even gotten phone calls from school counselor’s who are very pleased with the changes we’ve made,” said Ratliff. In the past the on-line application process was not user-friendly, she said. Now the confusing questions have been eliminated and the entire application procedure is being updated.

“And we’ve already got plans for how to improve next year’s summer hire program even more,” said Ratliff.

Devin Daniels is a summer intern from North Carolina State University who is spending his third summer working for NAVAIR as an engineering aid in the Support Equipment Engineering Department. Though he had no problem with the application process in the past, he has noticed some positive changes.

“The first two years I never received my employment package prior to my start date,” said Daniels. “I would have to spend several hours my first day filling out paperwork that could have been done at home. This year the package came several weeks early – the whole process seemed to be easier.”

The NAVAIR Black Belt who headed up the Summer Hire Process Improvement Kaizen Project is John Gatt. He is very excited about the success of the program.

“This is the very first NAVAIR AIRSpeed project with validated savings,” said Gatt. That validation, he explained, proves the new process performed even better than the team had hoped.

In an effort to increase the time and financial savings across the entire NAVAIR organization, the team has developed a plan to share their results with other sites. According to Gatt, 4.0C Cherry Point (as the project sponsor), will forward the results of the project to their site equivalents. They will also host meetings with candidate replication sites and offer advice on conducting Kaizen events to tailor their solutions. The replication progress will be monitored and reported as a final 4.0 corporate result.

For more information about the Summer Hire Process Improvement Kaizen Project, contact Kathy Ratliff ([email protected]). For general information about NAVAIR AIRSpeed, go to http://www.navair.navy.mil/navairairspeed/. For specific information regarding the AIRSpeed tools used in this Kaizen event, contact John Gatt ([email protected]).