Warner Robins Air Logistics Center Returns Giant Transport Planes to War Theater in Record Time

The Problem

The process of repairing and overhauling the giant C-5 Galaxy military cargo planes is extremely complex and expensive. Routine maintenance of a C-5 takes between 40,000 and 50,000 man-hours. Despite significant recent productivity gains at The Warner Robins Air Logistics Center (WR-ALC) in Warner Robins, Georgia, about 10% of the Air Force’s C-5 fleet was being worked on at that facility at any given time. Turnaround time on a maintenance job averaged 240 days. At a time of high demand in the Iraqi war theater, WR-ALC needed to step up the pace and efficiency of overhauling C-5s to keep a higher proportion of the C-5s in service and to address budgetary pressures on the Air Force.

The WR-ALC’s C-5 line employs some two dozen supervisors and 460 mechanics, organized by skill groups and deployed both for routine (“program depot maintenance,” or “PDM”) scheduled and unscheduled upkeep and repairs to the C-5 fleet. The impediments to the smooth operation of PDM effort include the inherent complexity of the work itself and manpower and equipment constraints that can trigger cascading delays in the maintenance of other aircraft when unanticipated problems with occur with one C-5.

The Analytics Solution 

In 2005, WR-ALC decided to use the innovative and sophisticated analytics-based “critical chain project management” (CCPM) technique to gain greater efficiencies in juggling the multiple complex C-5 repair and maintenance tasks for multiple planes, simultaneously. CCPM’s approach to task management includes the principle of “reducing the amount of work in execution by releasing new work based on the status of the most ‘loaded’ resources, since they load the amount of work that can be completed,” according to leaders of the effort from WR-ALC, Realization Technologies, and the University of Tennessee.

The critical chain project management approach also removes scheduling buffers from individual tasks, and aggregates them into a buffer for the total project. Under CCPM, schedules for resources are not created at the planning phase but rather at the execution phase, based on how much of a buffer remains. In a multi-project situation such as the WR-ALC C-5 maintenance operation, those tasks with the least amount of buffer time are assigned the highest priority.

The Value

The application of critical chain project management has enabled WR-ALC to reduce the number of C-5s in the maintenance depot by 38%, from 13 to 8, in just a five-month period. That drop coincided with a targeted reduction in the average turn-around time for a C-5 by 33%, from 240 days to 160 days. The annual economic benefits of this increase in productivity at WR-ALC are projected to be $75 million, based on the assumed daily economic value of C-5s when in operation. Noneconomic benefits include increased responsiveness and casualty avoidance during wartime.