TOBYHANNA ARMY DEPOT, Pa. -Lean practitioners from across the Department of Defense came together to share, learn and educate each other during a Continuous Process Improvement workshop, held at Tobyhanna Army Depot, April 22-23.
"This is the first of what I believe will be many types of these events," J. D. Sicilia, director of the Department of Defense's Lean Six Sigma program office, noted during his welcome speech.
The workshop, which was a chance for networking and best practice sharing, included participants from the Department of Defense (DoD) industrial base, the Defense Logistics Agency and Army Materiel Command (AMC).
"This is an opportunity for those who have demonstrated success and excellence in what they're doing to come together and network with others," Sicilia explained to a panel of 75 personnel.
"The objectives are pretty simple. I want you to walk away with at least one thing you've learned here so you can go back to your organization and improve it," Sicilia said, noting that he invited personnel from organizations across the Army, Navy and Air Force who have demonstrated to be "best in class."
He said the need for a workshop stems from his goal of getting the DoD to perform as an enterprise, and started looking into having the workshop about a year ago.
"We discovered that there were so many pockets of excellence in the DoD, that we're really working in isolation," he explains, adding, "when you have Shingo award ceremonies and you see that they [DoD organizations] won a Shingo, and they're doing this, you wonder if they're talking to each other. Most of the time the answer was 'no' because they didn't have a venue to do that."
The two-day workshop focused on Tobyhanna's Lean Six Sigma (LSS) achievements and lessons learned, as well as the LSS accomplishments of the other present DoD industrial facilities.
"A lot of this is just networking and communication to get the common vision shared among all the separate entities," he said, adding that he hopes workshop attendees recognize that they have commonalities with the other services and activities.
Kimberly McCabe, deputy director of the Army's Enterprise Task Force explained that the experiences shared during the DoD Depot CPI workshop "reinforced the importance of collaboration and communication amongst the services deploying Continuous Process Improvement."
"We now have a whole list of CPI 'partners' that we met through this workshop," notes Brad Jones, director of the Productivity, Improvement and Innovation (PII) Directorate. "We plan on bouncing ideas off them in the future; that alone is huge."
During the workshop Sicilia touched upon the idea that in order for the DoD to become an enterprise, it must focus on four components.
Strategic alignment/project selection are on the most important aspects that will "drive the biggest bang for your buck," and aligning those aspects to the mission of the organization.
Consistency of approach, which Sicilia notes turned out to be a bigger challenge than he thought it was, focuses on combining Lean and Six Sigma methodology. "I continued to hear a separation between Lean and Six Sigma; Lean is used to eliminate non-value added steps and Six Sigma is implemented to align and separate," he explained after hearing the briefings and panel discussions.
Integration, which was the purpose of the workshop, concentrates on bringing data together, sharing information, taking and selecting lessons learned, and applying it to the organization.
"There's a lot to learn from what we did wrong and if we can share what went wrong then we can save others that dip in their performance, and help accelerate their improvement," Sicilia said when speaking about the importance of sharing lessons learned with other organizations.
Col. Ron Alberto, depot commander, notes that the most important thing he learned at the workshop is "we don't have integration across the AMC, Army or DoD," adding that, "there's tremendous opportunity for senior leaders to try and figure out how to make this process more efficient."
"It's difficult to improve a process if we have nothing to compare or measure against, notes John Scott, who briefed participants on the employee benefits of Lean Six Sigma. "We need to share the lessons we learn. By doing so we are not only able improve ourselves, but the DoD team as a whole." Scott is a process improvement specialist in the PII Directorate.
The last component, human capital, consists of providing a certification and additional skill identifier to employees.
The combination of the four areas, roped together by leadership, will result in a DoD enterprise, Sicilia explained, adding that managers need to pay attention to what employees have to say because empowerment will increase productivity.
"Let them [employees] drive the car, just keep them out of the ditch," Kennith Brumley told attendees during his brief. He is the director of Red River Army Depot's Office of Enterprise Excellence.
"I am sure that you are going to learn something," Sicilia initially told participants, but he wasn't anticipating that the workshop would be such a success.
"The small bits of information learned in the conference have the ability to make a huge impact on the overall Continuous Process Improvement, DoD-wide," explains Scott, adding that it was good to get the information into one room, instead of keeping it miles apart.
"We will take the lessons learned during this conference and apply them to our [the Army's] Institutional Adaptation efforts including tackling the complex challenges we face in optimizing Army Force Generation as well as DoD enterprise-level projects," McCabe notes.
Mark Greenwood, chief of the Enterprise Excellence Division, Anniston Army Depot, notes that he appreciated the time during breaks, lunch and the bus rides to talk with others involved in CPI, and that he gained inside knowledge on what works for other's organizations, and looks forward to the next workshop.
Others took more away from the workshop than expected, such as Edward George, who briefed participants on LSS internal supplies and customers.
"We were able to see new technology that we may be able to use to provide better support to the warfighter," he says, noting that the depot needs to improve wherever and whenever possible, in order to better processes. George is chief of the Mobile Equipment Refinishing Branch, Systems Integration and Support Directorate.
A promising outcome of the workshop is an enterprise-wide project that involves depots coming together to solve common issues, such as improving a painting process. Sicilia also plans for organizing more workshops but is uncertain of the frequency.
"Having a workshop annually is too far away but quarterly may be too often. We hope to get input from the workshop's participants."
"Since this was an inaugural event we get to be the benchmark," Alberto says, explaining that by hosting the workshop here, "we were able to showcase the strengths and weaknesses of the depot, and learn from all the people who attended."
Sicilia anticipates that everyone will leave the workshop with a contact list and communicate with each other on a regular and frequent basis.
Jones says that since the workshop, Tobyhanna has initiated several new actions to follow-up on good ideas gained from the workshop, such as technology insertion on gyroscopes, noting that it's "just the tip of the iceberg," because there were a lot of pragmatic ideas and improvements covered during the event.
"Hopefully they have walked away with something they learned here, and that they can apply to their organizations. If that happens I will have met my objectives."
Tobyhanna Army Depot is the Defense Department's largest center for the repair, overhaul and fabrication of a wide variety of electronics systems and components, from tactical field radios to the ground terminals for the defense satellite communications network. Tobyhanna's missions support all branches of the Armed Forces.
About 5,600 personnel are employed at Tobyhanna, which is located in the Pocono Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania.
Tobyhanna Army Depot is part of the U.S. Army CECOM Life Cycle Management Command. Headquartered at Fort Monmouth, N.J., the command's mission is to research, develop, acquire, field and sustain communications, command, control computer, intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors capabilities for the Armed Forces.
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