Lean and Mean

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Today on the bookshelves of nearly every Army office in the Pentagon, alongside military-history tomes, sits a stack of business books that try to decipher what Lean Six Sigma means. Harvey, the spiritual godfather of the Army's transformation, tries to cut through the jargon. "We used to call it 'quality and productivity improvement' or 'total quality management,'" says Harvey, who worked for Westinghouse for nearly three decades. "The bottom line is, you take the extra steps out of the system, and improvement should be ongoing and forever."

While Lean and Six Sigma have traditionally been applied to manufacturing, the Army is using them in administrative offices as well. Last year for the first time, Harvey began requiring precise monthly figures on how many employees the service had. Then he gave commanders the responsibility of scrutinizing every new hire. Largely through attrition, the Army recorded a mere 2.6% increase in civilian employees in 2005. And Harvey did his part: his office now has 30% fewer than when he took the job in 2004.

His officers are doing the same. General Ben Griffin, the head of Army Matériel Command--the service's central procurement organization for equipment--has dramatically cut the number of meetings, reports and briefings. He installed seven senior officers around the world, in part to track progress on Lean Six Sigma, and gets Army-wide operational updates every week by videoconference rather than in-person meetings. Griffin says his command alone saved $110 million last year, and military sources expect that to be doubled this year.

But it is on shop floors like Red River's where the changes are starting to show the most impressive results. Worn-out humvees used to be brought into a poorly lit, dirty and disorganized loading bay; now the vehicles move through a bright, gleaming shop floor--with American flags draped from the ceiling--in an assembly-line method, complete with a horn that blares every 23 min. to signal a move to a new station. Workers called waterspiders (named for the bugs that flit across the top of ponds) scurry back and forth to fetch tools and equipment for higher-skilled mechanics, who stay close to the humvees. Evans tracks the slightest delays. When an employee missed work for a family emergency last December and slowed the entire line, Evans realized that he had not cross-trained enough workers to fill in. Now he has at least one backup for every critical spot. Red River is also stocking more parts and requiring better quality from suppliers. The changes are paying off: the facility can turn out 32 mission-ready humvees a day, compared with three a week in 2004; the Lean process has lowered the cost of repair for one vehicle from $89,000 to $48,000.