ANAD employee earns Black Belt certification

By Mrs. Jennifer Bacchus (AMC)December 19, 2013

ANAD employee earns Black Belt certification
(Photo Credit: U.S. Army) VIEW ORIGINAL

ANNISTON ARMY DEPOT, Ala. -- Aaron Parris, a process improvement specialist in the depot's Directorate of Engineering and Quality was recently awarded Black Belt certification, the highest level of Lean training.

Parris' began his career with the depot as a cooperative education student in 2001 while attending Gadsden State Community College. He soon began hearing about Lean in the shops and wanted to get involved.

"I had an opportunity to participate in a Value Stream Analysis and saw a lot of opportunities to improve people's work," said Parris.

In 2009, after serving on various Lean teams throughout the year and expanding his knowledge of it, Parris was selected as a facilitator of Lean events by DEQ.

At the time, Black Belt certification felt like an unattainable dream. Then, a project came along that could help him achieve it - quantifying the interoperation times for the Logistics Management Program.

LMP has six designations used to record the time a part spends being repaired or overhauled - three are operational times and three are interoperational times such as queue, wait and move.

The operational times could be determined and entered easily, but the lack of designated interoperational time was causing scheduling problems for overhaul and repair programs throughout the installation.

"It was decided we couldn't take every vehicle and determine interoperational times, so, we took one of the smaller programs, the M9 Armored Combat Earthmover," said Parris.

The first phase of the project focused on the time that parts were outside of buildings. Parris' next project, "Improvement of Logistic Modernization Program's Scheduling Aspect for M9ACE Generation 2", will focus on time within the individual buildings associated with M9ACE work. The finale to all of this work is to apply the lessons learned on the M9ACE to other vehicle programs.