Originally Posted by
Jobza Guddun
I work on a FJ squadron and LEAN is well and truly under way.
Honestly and truthfully I am hard pushed to think of one single POSITIVE that has come out of it all so far, in my small world. In fact, I feel that the Aircraft Engineering side has been ripped off/conned/downright lied to. In simple terms we've seen Eng manpower seriously carved up, yet we pursue the same amount of flying (arguably more tenaciously) with the same number of aircrew as before, with more aircraft than was agreed to. Despite changes in operations, we struggle more now than I can ever remember in all my different postings.
The manpower wasn't cut because of Lean; it was cut because the decision was made to cut the number of blue-suiters overall and a slice was cut from the number of technicians on every fleet. Lean is a tool being used to try and work out how to acheive the task with the resources we have left; BluntedAtBirth has hit the nail on the head on that one. As with any tool, a large degree of how useful it is depends on how it's used... all too often I've seen people trying to use it to justify decisions already taken, which is contrary to the whole idea Lean is based on and predictably not popular.
I can't have the only bay in the Service where everyone's pretty pleased with the results of leaning, with the guys pushing out more kit with slightly fewer people in a working environment/pattern they've pretty much designed themselves, yet still having time for sport etc?