By Vicky Falcón
NAVAIR Public Affairs

Parts break, connections fail, components stop working – that’s life.

But life in the U.S. Navy means that if a part breaks unpredictably or a component stops working unexpectedly, there is recourse. Engineering Investigations (EIs) for Navy and Marine Corps aircraft are performed by members of NAVAIR’s Fleet Service Team (FST) to determine the cause and then resolve unanticipated failures.

An EI request is initially sent from the Fleet user. Using a hazard risk assessment (HRA) tool, that request is then evaluated by an FST engineer, who recommends a “go/no go” determination to accept or reject the request. However, FSTs at Cherry Point, N.C., have expressed concern that the HRA tool in use was ineffective and that risk assessments were subjective and could be made to fit a desired outcome.

Besides the lack of a standardized process for evaluating EI requests, there were several other concerns with EIs, as well, according to Brian Stephens, an Air Vehicle Subsystems Senior engineer at Cherry Point, and an AIRSpeed Black Belt.

“First, many of the EIs that were performed did not add any value,” he said. “The estimate is that we accepted 15% too many EIs.”

Secondly, according to Stephens, the average FST/program office Response Cycle Time to make a decision and advise the Fleet whether the EI was accepted was way too long at Cherry Point – in 2004 it was an average of 25 days.

Those slow response times, the number of unnecessary EIs performed and the lack of a standardized process in evaluating EIs led to the EI Selection Process Black Belt project.

Frank Wasko, Systems Engineering Department head at Cherry Point, was the project sponsor. “This was one of the first AIRSpeed projects Cherry Point Engineering accomplished,” he said. “We learned a lot of lessons from this.”

One of the first lessons the team learned, according to Wasko, was not to take on too much. “Once we narrowed the project’s focus to a particular area I noticed a remarkable interest the team had to go out and do a good job.”

The team decided to concentrate their efforts on replacing the HRA with a more effective risk assessment tool. Several other AIRSpeed projects are planned to resolve other issues related to performing EIs.

Michelle Stone, a power and propulsion systems engineer at Cherry Point, was one of the team members. Since working on this project she has gone through Green Belt training and received her Black Belt training.

“The team developed the new tool in a week-long Kaizen event that included FST engineers, system safety engineers, program office class desk engineers and a representative from North Island, Ca.,” she said.

During the Kaizen event, the team developed a new risk assessment tool (now called an EI Decision Tool) that would identify “Value Added/Non-Value Added” EIs on the basis of the Engineering Investigation request. That new tool poses a series of seven questions to create a decision model. Answers to those questions determine whether the EI is safety related or a routine investigation. It also helps to rule out repetitive EIs.

“Our team felt strongly about wanting to make a change in this area,” said Stone. “A lot of engineers felt the same – the old risk analysis tool was not representative of the questions we ask ourselves when we determine to reject or accept an EI.”

Mike Graves agrees with that assessment. Graves, division manager for Air Vehicle Systems at Cherry Point, was also a member of the Black Belt project team.

“The number one issue with the old risk assessment tool was that the engineer evaluation was sometimes based on sparse information,” he said. “We often did not know enough about the root cause of the failure mode to make a decision.”

To test the team’s new tool, they then reviewed 38 completed EIs to compare the requests and final reports. Using the new EI decision tool developed by the team, two of the 38 reports were determined to be of no value and ten of 30 were determined to be “missed” value.

According to Stone, missed value is a report that has the potential to be value added, but did not contain all of the appropriate information to access its true worth. Another AIRSpeed team is working to eliminate missed value EIs.

Further testing of the new decision model was conducted at Cherry Point, reassessing 23 completed EIs (18 routine EIs and five safety EIs) from previous years using the new decision model tool.

Of the 18 routine EIs reassessed, eight were now rejected. Of the five safety EIs, one was rejected because it had been previously investigated.

In order to confirm the test results a pilot project was begun at Cherry Point focusing on FSTs from the V-22, H-53, H-60, AV-8, H-1 and H-46 programs.

“The object of the pilot was to make sure the questions we used in the new EI decision tool were right,” said Graves. “We wanted to see if they could be realistically answered by the engineers. The whole pilot was geared to having engineers fill out the tool and then give us their feedback and input as we worked toward a final version of the tool.”

The results of the pilot compared EIs from 2005 to those in 2006. The most significant decrease was in the V-22 program where there was a 43% reduction in acceptance rate. Overall, Cherry Point saw an 11% reduction in EI acceptance rates – 69 fewer EIs – with a savings of $345,000.

“If we assume the same financial results across the Naval Aviation Enterprise the savings would be $1.26 million,” said Stephens.

The new EI decision tool has since been placed on the NAVAIR Naval Aviation Maintenance Discrepancy Reporting Program (NAMDRP) Web site, which houses all EI data.

“The success of the pilot gave us a clear course to export the tool to the rest of NAVAIR,” said Wasko, “and that was done January 10 of this year.”

“The process is more rigorous and standardized,” Stone added. “This new process also gives us more accurate information on why EIs are accepted or rejected; resulting in more value added EIs so in the end the Fleet gets a bigger bang for their buck.”

For more information about NAVAIR AIRSpeed, go to http://www.navair.navy.mil/navairairspeed/.