Rockwell Collins Lean Journey acheives decades long success
Rockwell Collins (now Collins Aerospace) launched a Lean Electronics program in 1997. I joined the organization in Jan 1999 at the same time as CEO Clay Jones took over. One of his key initiatives was to embrace and deploy Lean throughout the organization, and I think he did an outstanding job of doing that.
My role was to help bring in more Six Sigma methods while helping teams learn and implement Lean. Thie Lean and Six Sigma program was still going strong when I left in 2017 after 18 years of service. Many improvement initiatives don’t last 3 years, so this is indeed a success story.
As an example of the success of the program, they acheved the following success in an office environment (publishing)
- 72% reduction in publishing cycle time
- 70% WIP reduction
- 38% productivity improvement
- 77% manuals inventory reduction
In the manufacturing area, they achieved the following results:
- 25% productivity improvement
- 46% reduction in inventory
- Cycle time reductions of 75% and greater
I will list some specific projects I worked on in other case studies, but I am very proud of the work I did to help bring Six Sigma into the program, help the initiative continue through a few ups and downs, help deploy it to two different facilities (Melbourne and Wilsonville) and change the culture through numerous conversations and teaching opportunities I had with employees, managers, suppliers and customers.
You can learn more about the history of Lean Electronics from a 2006 speech from Clay Jones, along with my breakdown and insights from his speech on my series of podcasts (episodes 104-109) in Lean Six Sigma Bursts.
