engineering management
a
short stroll
Boeing makes
a big investment to get engineers and manufacturers speaking face-to-face.
you
don't know if you're truly compatible with someone until you live together.
At Boeing's Commercial Airplanes 737 Program in Renton, Wash.—which
makes 737-model airplanes for business travelers—mechanics, manufacturers,
and engineers weren't under the same roof. The engineering department
was a few miles from the factory.
Design engineers communicated mainly with the manufacturing side, including
mechanics, builders, and manufacturing engineers, by e-mail and fax. When
e-mails bounced back and forth, much was lost in translation.
Mechanical engineers didn't have hands-on access to parts they had designed.
Change orders cropped up more than managers liked. Manufacturers had difficulty
picking engineers' brains, or asking them why they'd designed a certain
part just so.
Boeing solved that problem by moving manufacturers and engineers into
the same hangar space.
"We relied too much on e-mail, and engineers weren't coming over
to look at airplanes," said Mark Garvin, the program manager who
oversaw the move, which was only recently completed. "We wanted to
get engineers next to people and product they support."
About one year ago, industrial and mechanical engineers packed up their
desks and moved from an office tower to the two new office buildings constructed
at the factory, which sits on the Boeing campus near Lake Washington.
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| Boeing moved 1,000 engineers at its commercial 737 plant. |
Boeing remodeled the factory—also known as the airplane hangar—and
added approximately 3,000 square feet of office space. About 1,000 engineers
moved in and now sit where they can see the assembly floor. All told,
some 4,000 people were shuffled, including administrative and plant-floor
personnel as part of this move, which occurred with no workflow interruptions.
Airplanes were simply built amid the construction mess, Garvin said. According
to Garvin, the move was part of Boeing's lean manufacturing initiative.
"Lean manufacturing means the relentless pursuit of waste,"
he said. "When you have a few people making a decision and it's done
through e-mail going around, there's so much potential for rework, and
for waste."
The relocation sounds like an easy enough answer to workplace woes. But
the Move to the Lake project, as it's called, represents one of the largest
capital expenditures in Boeing history, costing tens of millions of dollars.
It made for a huge facilities-planning effort, said Carolyn Corvi, who
was at that time Boeing's vice president and general manager of the 737
and 757 programs.
She spearheaded the 18-month Move to the Lake effort; now, she is Boeing's
vice president and general manager of airplane production.
Garvin oversaw the planning effort. Keeping the affected parties informed
and ready for change was no easy task, he said. A team made up of the
directors of engineering manufacturing, quality assurance, human resources,
program management, and assorted vice presidents fleshed out how the campus
should look and what purposes it should serve.
Manufacturing, mechanical, and industrial engineers as well as customer
service and administrative employees now inhabit offices on two mezzanine
levels, where they can see 737s march past a glass wall in various stages
of assembly, Corvi said.
The recently completed move means that engineers can take a stroll out
to the assembly floor to check how successfully their designs made the
transition to actual parts. If mechanics request a design change, engineers
can see up close exactly why the part wasn't working as designed.
The story begins some years back, when the Boeing division implemented
its lean initiative.
According to Boeing, lean worked great. Program managers found that parts
moved along the factory floor and through assembly smoother than ever.
The company established a just-in-time inventory program, reduced on-hand
inventory, and generally saw the manufacturing floor humming along.
It was time for the next stage: working together under the same roof for
better communication. The name Move to the Lake may sound odd, but means
just what it says. People moved literally just down the road, yet the
cultural change was huge, and adjustment was not always easy, Garvin said.
Why were Boeing executives willing to pony up so much money for a simple
relocation? What's more, why were they willing to do so on the heels of
9/11, when airlines throughout the nation faced financial difficulty as
the traveling public stayed home?
"This is all about changing behaviors and the way people work together,"
Corvi said.
The main reason, of course, was that information could move back and forth
unimpeded by technological snafus or misunderstandings, she said. The
move also meant that manufacturers, mechanics, and engineers could collaborate
better, because they could speak directly with each other.
"Now engineers can talk to the mechanic and fix that part right on
the spot," Garvin said. "The mechanic can even show them how
to design it so it can be installed in a way they'd like."
Architects aimed for the feel of a little city in a big building—a
place where everyone lived harmoniously despite their different jobs and
backgrounds, said Lori Walker of the Seattle architectural firm NBBJ,
which designed the space. Sure, that's a pie in the sky idea, but it's
workable to some degree.
The office move was a hassle, as is any move. But merging two cultures,
engineering and manufacturing, proved to be the greater challenge, as
Boeing executives knew it would be.
"In the factory, there are no windows. It's a dirty en-
vironment really—just roll up your sleeves and build," Garvin
said. "Whereas engineers worked in a typical glass-enclosed office
environment with cubicles."
The move was designed to get those cultures to integrate, but how best
to do so?
small-town life
Boeing executives decided that the workspace should make interaction as
easy as possible. Engineers didn't have to lose the private cubicles where
they felt most comfortable, but the cubes are now located a short stroll
from the plant floor, in buildings that flank the assembly line.
Architects designed an open, sunny space that is easily adaptable to future
change. Engineers remain in cubes that open onto the assembly area. Even
executives inhabit office cubicles, which means that groups can be easily
merged, created, and rearranged, Garvin said.
The mobile office space makes the Boeing program lighter on its feet,
better able to respond to change, he said.
"The idea was that this should never not look like a factory,"
architect Walker said. "But we took a factory and made a place where
people could concentrate."
Architects were also challenged to strike the right balance in space and
light, without appearing to favor either the manufacturing or engineering
side.
Noise control was one big challenge, Walker said. But the glass that separates
the assembly area from office space helped turn factory sounds into white
noise for the cubicle workers. Seeing the assembly floor lets engineers
remember they're actually working in a factory, Garvin added.
"We wanted to create a culture where we didn't have a lot of stereotype
going on," he said. "Like all the white collar people being
in an office, with the leaders in Taj Mahal offices, and blue collar people
on the main floor."
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| Boeing builds commercial versions of its 737 at a Washington plant where key parts of the operation have been brought together under one roof. |
The engineers' office area features high ceilings and exposed beams and
pipes, a look Garvin described as "industrial cool." The engineering
area is not newly built; it was used previously for factory storage. The
pipes and beams also remind engineers that they're part of factory production.
Twenty-foot-wide doors in the engineering area open onto the assembly
line, which is 1,000 feet long.
"So engineers can hear the sounds, can sense the movement and the
activity, and feel very much part of it," Garvin said. "That's
creating culture of one team rather than of two groups."
Two office towers, each three stories high, flank the assembly line and
engineering area.
The challenge now is using this new space to the best advantage. Thus,
the Knowledge Café. This coffee bar really drives home the new initiative,
Garvin said. The break area was expressly designed to get engineers out
of their offices and mingling.
"In the past, if you saw employees standing around the water cooler,
you might see that as not working," Garvin said. "But now we
think of it as employees creating a relationship. If they're in a meeting
later in the day and have this relationship already, well, that helps
at the meeting.
"Our leaders have to understand that if employees are relaxing on
a couch, that's okay," he added. "For Boeing, that's a big stretch,
but it's part of this grand experiment."
The café features sofas, tables, and an open view of airplanes on
the factory floor. At any time, engineers can actually walk above that
factory floor on what's termed the Boeing boardwalk. It runs the entire
assembly-floor length at mezzanine level.
The boardwalk helps further connect the engineering and manufacturing
operations, Garvin said.
Adjusting to the new digs was hard for the engineers. Many were nervous
about moving from an office where they felt comfortable to "being
right out there with the manufacturing folks," in Garvin's words.
The manufacturing side had it no easier.
"Many folks felt they'd been ignored by the engineers, and now here
they were right in their space," Garvin said.
Boeing took active steps to keep nerves, and tempers, to a minimum before
and during the move. Garvin's department issued regular building-progress
updates and passed out moving schedules so employees knew what to expect
and when they'd be relocating.
For his part, Garvin said that he found no such thing as over-communication.
"When you involve 4,000 people and you're changing their lives, well,
work is a big part of their lives," he said. "So when someone's
telling them, 'You're going to be moving,' that's a huge emotional thing
for them.
"Change can be exciting or terrifying to people," he said.
Boeing's communication plan included posting updates on the company intranet
and posting fliers in prominent locations. Having managers speak to employees
both in teams and one-on-one helped alleviate some of that anxiety.
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ASME and Boeing Working Together In June, ASME and Boeing agreed to work jointly in |
The move paid off. But quantifying just how well Move to the Lake returned
benefits remains a difficult puzzle. Executives compared the aircraft-assembly
timeline both before and after the move, and found significant improvement.
But judging the quality of engineers' work is another animal entirely—intangible,
but not impossible.
"We hear from engineers who say they performed an engineering change
that took three or four days in the past, because change orders went through
e-mails and the engineer might not have made that change his complete
focus," Garvin said. "But engineers tell me, 'Now I come in
and walk by an airplane and a mechanic asks me to make a change and says
it's holding things up.' And managers are all over so engineers can process
the change faster. That same change takes maybe one day now."
Boeing managers also report that their teams can take on greater workloads
without adding team members because employees are working more efficiently.
In fact, Garvin says he can measure the move's positive results by what's
not going on. In a word: additional hiring.
Relocating to nice digs next to a lake didn't hurt morale, either. And
the coffee breaks in nice surroundings are always appreciated.
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© 2005 by The American Society of Mechanical Engineers