Professor Leads $49.8 M Air Force Maintenance Overhaul

A University of Tennessee professor helped a team win the Franz Edelman Award for delivering $49.8 million in annual revenue gains by dramatically accelerating the maintenance of the U.S. Air Force’s largest transport aircraft, the C‑5.

The work took only eight months and cost less than $1 million.

UT Professor Mandyam Srinivasan, along with the Warner Robins Air Logistics Center in Georgia and software provider Realization Technologies Inc., earned the competition often dubbed the “Super Bowl” of business operations research. Five finalists vied for the top prize, awarded on May 1.

Srinivasan is the Ball Corp. Distinguished Professor of Business, an internationally acclaimed Lean Management and Theory of Constraints specialist. He is a core faculty member of UT’s College of Business Administration executive MBA and Lean Enterprise programs.

Winning project

The Warner Robins Air Logistics Center is a key U.S. Air Force maintenance hub for the C‑5, C‑17, C‑130 transport planes and the F‑15 fighter jet. The C‑5, the world’s largest transport aircraft, is aging and out of production, the team noted.

Before UT’s involvement, C‑5 repairs averaged 240 days, and the facility had up to 13 aircraft—over 10 % of the fleet—under repair simultaneously. With each C‑5 capable of generating at least $40,000 daily in transport revenue, more than $500,000 of potential income was tied up per day in the repair bays.

Warner Robins faced intense pressure from the U.S. military to shorten turnaround times and increase flight hours.

Bill Best, deputy director of an aircraft maintenance group at Warner Robins and a graduate of UT’s Aerospace MBA program, partnered with Srinivasan to tackle the challenge. Best had previously worked with Srinivasan to cut costs in another area of the center, and saw the value of applying Critical Chain Project Management to the C‑5 effort.

Critical Chain Project Management enables facilities to analyze processes and allocate resources more efficiently. Realization Technologies Inc. supplies Concerto, a leading software suite for implementing this methodology.

By adopting this approach, Warner Robins cut C‑5 turnaround time to 160 days and reduced the average number of aircraft under repair from 13 to seven.

The program’s impact on revenue and savings is substantial. Five additional operational aircraft generate an estimated $49.8 million annually. Replacing the capacity of those five C‑5s would have cost roughly $2.37 billion.

Furthermore, the efficiency gains freed workforce capacity that is projected to bring an extra $119 million in revenue through 2008 and $248 million through 2009. By keeping fewer C‑5s in the repair bays, 11 dock spaces are now available for other work—an opportunity that would have otherwise required an estimated $220 million to build new docks.

Ken Percell, the senior‑most civilian at Warner Robins, noted at the awards ceremony that “another key consequence we measure not in dollars, but in human lives. The five C‑5s returned to the Air Force will immediately reduce dangerous convoy operations in combat zones, saving countless lives that might otherwise be lost.”

Srinivasan explained that fewer aircraft in the repair facility reduces resource contention, allowing maintenance teams to focus on fewer jets at once and improving overall quality.

Buoyed by the C‑5 success, Warner Robins is applying Critical Chain Project Management to the C‑130 fleet, aiming to cut work‑in‑process from 24 aircraft to 15.