Expanding knowledge and recognizing achievements of six waves of NAVAIR AIRSpeed Black Belts was the business of the first semi-annual Black Belt Symposium, held July 21 at the Southern Maryland Higher Education Center in Hollywood, Md.

Featured speakers were VADM Walter Massenburg, NAVAIR’s commander, and Lean Six Sigma consultant Michael George, chairman & CEO of the George Group.

Michael George focused on the problems and difficulties of dealing with complexity in systems, how those non-value-added elements add cost, and how to confront them. His examples were drawn from industry, such as IBM, Microsoft, Porsche, and Capital One, as well as everyday life, such as driving on L.A. freeways. He proposed that, in order to confront the asymmetric world that is unfolding, the Navy and the Fleet will need to take the enterprise approach in everything from bit rates to metrics.

VADM Massenburg’s theme was threefold: explain to the Black Belts how the pieces of the Naval Aviation Enterprise (NAE) are coming together; how NAVAIR is being transformed by AIRSpeed and their efforts; and how the organization is on its way to becoming a center of excellence in service to the warfighter.

“The history of too many stovepipes, wrong incentives and poor readiness is the history of no one taking responsibility,” said Massenburg. “And no one looked at the right model to transform Naval Aviation. Instead of patterning ourselves on Southwest Airlines, we used United.”

After Chief of Naval Operations Vern Clark toured the depots, “he just got mad,” said Massenburg, at the lack of process accountability and the mounting cost of readiness. Clark then set the Navy on a two-year NAVRIIP (Naval Aviation Readiness Integrated Improvement Program) journey to get current readiness fixed.

By 2003, the depots began to value their jobs and understand their business better. Lean Six Sigma was well underway, and CNO Clark was being treated to explanations of its workings by artisans and staff. This was the beginning of the process to understand the value chain and drive efficient processes throughout NAVAIR.

Earlier, NAVAIR seemed willing to live by the notion that the organization and its infrastructure represented ends to be sought in their own right. The $27 billion that passes through NAVAIR was never scrubbed or challenged; nor was the idea that more is better, big is best. “In the ‘90s, we built a moat around this place and filled it with money,” as the Admiral put it.

Now NAVAIR is on the journey of transforming into a center of excellence, focusing on outcome not organization. The means for doing that is AIRSpeed and new thinking about what NAVAIR should be and do. What it must do, particularly since 9/11, is serve the warfighter efficiently and well. It must also develop the cost efficiencies to provide for the future of Naval Aviation, and that is what the Black Belts are doing.

Massenburg went on to cite examples of how the NAE must drive NAVAIR activities, such as the F404 story of engine rework that achieved great success through applying AIRSpeed principles. He mentioned examples of projects now underway, such as:

- the Support Equipment Management System, which greatly reduces error rates in distribution and equipment allowances
- Rapid Deployment of NAVAIR Engineering Resources, which reduced the average time needed to get an engineer to Iraq from 12 days to 3
- the Prowler J52 engine rebuild team’s efforts, which have greatly extended engine life, flying hours and reduced rebuild time from 50 days to 4
- the Summer Hire program at NADEP Cherry Point, which cut the cost of hiring from $12,800 to $2,400 per recruit.

The 122 Black Belts who attended also received awards for their AIRSpeed efforts. “The future leaders of NAVAIR are sitting in this room,” Admiral Massenburg said. “You are going to enable us to afford our future.”

The symposium also offered a series of five workshops to help Black Belts expand their toolkits:

- Financial representative training and benefits
- The Naval Reserve Program for training and mentoring Black Belts and Green Belts in industry settings
- Supplemental Chi-Square training using Mini-Tab
- Using PowerPoint, Visio and Excel to their full potential.
- How to find, share and manage vital information on the AIRSpeed Community of Interest Web site

-USN-