U.S. Navy reshapes its battle fleet.

As the scope of military conflicts evolves, the United States Armed Forces have to keep up with frequent changes in strategy. Part of the military's tactical planning includes knowing how many personnel, how much equipment, and how much machinery is required to carry out necessary tasks. Such a

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With 50,000 government employees, the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAV-SEA) is seeing its numbers slowly drop in terms of both enlistment and arsenal. Spread out across the country, NAVSEA is headquartered at the Washington Navy Yard. The organization includes 11 warfare center divisions and operates four shipyards: Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in New Hampshire, Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Virginia, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Washington, and Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard in Hawaii. (Shipyards do repair work on the Navy warships; warfare centers do some repair work, though mostly involving engineering and design services and support for the Navy's ships and weapons systems.)

With expanding capability requirements that include operations for U.S. homeland security, the war on terror, and conventional campaigns, NAVSEA leaders aim to improve the Navy's value stream for its product lines, which include submarines, carriers, combat vessels, and two weapons systems: integrated weapons systems and lateral mine warfare.

"It's a different environment in the world today than maybe 10 years ago," said Jim Brice, NAVSEA task force lean director. "We're responding to different threats today, and that's going to employ, perhaps, different capabilities in the future."

To build a Navy for the future, Brice said NAVSEA must implement two key strategies: replenish its employee and ship numbers, and take on a lean Six Sigma approach to its machinery product lines. The goal for the Navy's industry partnerships, he added, is to deliver the best arsenal possible.

"We've got a huge effort to get cost production for the Virginia class submarines down so we can afford to build two a year in our country instead of one a year, for example," Brice said. "That would be a product line value stream focus."

The lean goals of NAVSEA don't stop there, with improvements being made in program management, contracts, and other industrial specifications. The goal is to standardize processes to streamline production while retaining fleet numbers and personnel.

Maintaining the fleet

The end of the Cold War in the late 1980s cut down much of the need for Navy ships and carriers around the world. In 1987, the Navy had a record high of 594 commissioned U.S. combat vessels, which doesn't include carriers. That number has dropped significantly in the past 20 years. Today, the Navy operates 283 ships, which may be sufficient in peacetime but doesn't appear to please the leaders who are strategizing the war on terror. In fact, Brice said that if the current build rate continues, which included the completion of only four ships in the past fiscal year, then there will be less than 200 active vessels in the next five years. In an effort to curb such a significant decrease, NAVSEA has registered a shipbuilding plan that would reach a total of 313 ships by mid-2020.

Brice said his long-term outlook showed the Navy reaching as many as 330 vessels by 2018 but dropping back to 313 by 2045 because of additional decommissioning. "While you're building, you've got to more than double the build rate because you're inactivating a lot of ships over that next 15-year period. So it's kind of a dynamic," said Brice.

The Navy's budget also will be a factor into assessing industrial shipbuilding output, a budget that Brice doesn't foresee being increased anytime soon. Congress currently sets aside around $100 billion. NAVSEA administers around $26 billion, but more than 20 billion (80 percent) of NAVSEA's budget goes into industry. Since the Navy's made a commitment to Congress to build a 313-ship fleet, it has to reprioritize funds and find new ways to create more budget for shipbuilding.

One of NAVSEA's most notable successes in its lean Six Sigma efforts was in 2002 at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in New Hampshire, which included a submarine pull valve shop. Brice said that the Submarine Safety Program components, which required critical care, ended up with a huge backlog among 10 personnel. At one point, 70 valves were disassembled and spread all over the shop. Workers were on the job six days a week, but they still were not able to keep up even with overtime.

The shipyard had applied new productivity tools: better planning, better engineering instruction, better training, and in a year's time the process was improved so dramatically that the backlog was gone. The application with the greatest impact was one-piece flow.

"You start a valve and you work it all the way through until it's finished, and if you run into a problem, you fix it," Brice said. "You get the engineers down there and you solve it instead of setting it aside and moving to the next one."

Then crew soon worked without overtime and they were producing valves with no disruption or delay to the ship schedules.

"They went from zero to hero," Brice said. "And we convinced ourselves, 'Wow, there's something here.' So we started applying it to more places."

More trained on demand

Brice said that lean Six Sigma is considered the primary method for achieving the Navy's shipbuilding plan regardless of budget or other resources made available or stripped away. Shipbuilding by the Navy involves a cycle of value-added steps that include research and development, design, construction, repair, and disposal. The cycles for each ship are currently being carried out by NAVSEA personnel, whose numbers are expected to grow in the next three years with the addition of 35,000 green belts and 7,000 black belts. Such a turnout, Brice said, would dwarf the personnel trained in lean Six Sigma at any industrial company.

"We're trying to deploy lean as not only a tool to improve processes but to help our people think differently and work hard to deliver value to the customers and to always be thinking about continuous improvement," he said.

In October 2006, Brice said that more than half of the 50,000 NAVSEA employees were trained in lean basics, either through being on a lean team and participating in actual improvement activity or by taking classroom instruction with hands-on simulation. "When I tell you half of my people got it, they got it," he said.

Brice added that NAVSEA had 290 employees trained as black belts, with more expected in the next few years: "Hiring the new workers of the future and replenishing our work force is part of a huge challenge we all face in the government, but particularly in our line of work." He added that NAVSEA and the other Navy systems commands are major players in this Navy effort and are leading the way.

--David Brandt is a former editorial assistant for Industrial Engineer.

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