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445th MXS in running for Chief of Staff Team Excellence Award

  • Published
  • By Stacy Vaughn
  • 445th Airlift Wing Public Affairs
The 445th Maintenance Squadron won at the Air Force Reserve Command level and is now competing against four other bases at the Air Force level for the 2016 Chief of Staff Team Excellence Awards.

Each year since 1992, the Chief of Staff Team Excellence Award has been presented by the Air Force Chief of Staff to a team that uses a systematic approach to enhance mission capability, improve operational performance and create sustained results. Competing teams must have completed a performance improvement within the last two years.

The 445th MXS submitted a team award for greatly reducing C-17 home station check flow time. The HSC Team used new findings to immediately refine the inspection process and continuously exceeded the goal.

Capt. Sarah Ripma, facilitator, has good words to say about her team on how far they’ve come over the years.

"I am so proud of the men and women who have been a part of our unit improvements. There are so many more people who currently invest in improving the unit beyond those listed on the event team, and I think the continued culture of squadron improvement is a true testament to the collective efforts of all of our members.

“The fact that we have even made it to the level of one of five semi-finalists is so impressive and worthy of accolade no matter who earns the final top selection. I look forward to our future accomplishments as a squadron and as a team."

In addition to Captain Ripma, team members include Chief Master Sgt. Michael West, champion; Senior Master Sgt. Benjamin Riggs, process owner; team members Master Sgts. Dennis Hartwick and Darrell Houston; Tech. Sgts. Michael Blake, Timothy J. Emberton, Jeremy First, Gerald Karkiewicz, Christopher Knight, Chad Lorenz, Brian Neill, Matt Spuhler and Stacy Tomkins; Staff Sgts. Kenneth Burkhardt, Joshua Dewitt, Toron Franklin, Ashley Roberts and Korey Smithward; and Ms. Nichole Morris.

“The 445th Maintenance Squadron supports the global strategic airlift mission by ensuring we have mission capable C-17s on the ready to deliver cargo around the world. To do this, we must ensure the aircraft are safe to fly which means we must accomplish a home station check every 120 days for each of our nine aircraft,” said Chief Master Sgt. Michael West, 445th MXS superintendent/HSC champion.

West said a few years ago, Home Station Checks (HSCs) were not well executed. The work wasn’t divided evenly leaving some Airmen doing more work than others. There was no standardization to what work was being done. The wing was also faced with a 10 percent manning shortage in critical maintenance career fields. It was then decided to create an HSC team to evaluate the process and look at what was being done with the available manpower.

The team took a look at what tasks each shop had and how to best coordinate all the career fields for this joint effort. A flow chart was developed, allowing each Airman to understand what to do and when. MXS invested in equipment, reducing the time it took to work on some of the identified bottleneck processes.

“To build a process all the shops could support, we had to look at what tasks each shop had and how to best coordinate all the career fields for this joint endeavor,” said HSC team member Tech. Sgt. Chad Lorenz.” With this thinking, we were able to standardize a flow chart for the six variations of HSCs that we faced.”

Lorenz said it wasn’t easy but once they were able to identify how things were to flow, they had to come up with a way to get it to be followed and repeatable.

“By drafting the flow chart at the planning meeting and publishing it on the floor, each Airman was able to understand what to do and when,” Lorenz said.

As processes were set in place and tweaked, maintenance reduced the time it took to complete the inspection work cards from an average of seven days to a continuous three-day operation before transitioning into the fix phase of the HSC. The average time was reduced from 168 hours to 78 hours and yielded 90 hours of non-mission capable time saved per HSC. The results annualized yielded 82.5 additional days of aircraft availability for essential missions.

This led to the maintainers recapitalizing 432 hours of their technician’s time that they could redistribute to other key tasks and professional development.

Per fiscal year, the Air Force is saving more than $623,200; 18,326 man hours at a rate of $34.01 per man hour.

“This savings was critical because like many of our fellow maintenance organizations, we, too, were undermanned and had a workload that required us to fly 104 percent of our scheduled flying hours,” West said. “By reducing the time it took to accomplish this task, this directly contributed to our mission capable rate, which led all of Air Force Reserve Command at 93 percent.”

“We’ve internalized the ‘continuous’ in continuous improvement and now work to improve the process even further,” said Senior Master Sgt. Benjamin Riggs, process owner. “We are working to make this a paperless process by eliminating the need to double document and store physical records.”