OREANDA-NEWS. April 06, 2012. A second Lean school of the Corporate University of the united industrial company OBORONPROM OJSC took place in the period of 15 – 17 March 2012 on the premises of NPO Saturn.

Around 80 representatives from 17 companies of the United engine company and The Russian Helicopters OJSC including the general manager of OBORONPROM Andrey Reus and general manager of The Russian Helicopters OJSC Dmitry Petrov had dedicated three days of working at NPO Saturn to the subject ‘Designing Lean operating systems for companies in the ODK group’.

During his inauguration address, NPO Saturn chief executive officer Ilya Fedorov stated that the implementation of Lean is a ‘long-distance run” and despite the two and a half years of implementing Lean in the company with active support of the French partners, there is still a long way to go. According to Ilya Fedorov, Lean transformations are not possible without the direct involvement of the company’s top management and that any innovation ‘requires strict adherence and enormous support’. The NPO Saturn CEO wished all the participants of the meeting success in solving the set practical tasks related to the SaM146 engine, whose production process improvement was the focus of the Rybinsk Lean school.

The Lean school was organized in the form of a workshop, seeking to solve both practical and training-within-the-industry objectives posed by SaM146 engine serial production program. As far as the SaM146 program implementation is concerned, at this point NPO Saturn is faced with a serious challenge of drastically boosting the serial production capacity for the SaM146 engine: from two-three engines a month today to eight engines a month by the end of 2012. To solve the practical tasks of increasing the production capability for the SaM146 engine, six production areas were chosen – six ‘bottlenecks’ that are holding back the production capacity thus limiting the number of engines produced on a monthly basis.

All the Lean school participants were divided into six teams where each team in the course of the first two days was solving the task of increasing the throughput capacity of a given production area. According to the representatives of the NPO Saturn Lean directorate ‘a fresh view can often provide an opportunity to find nonconventional solutions to conventional issues’. That is exactly the interest of NPO Saturn for conducting such workshop events.

The team proposing the best solution in terms of practical implementation and methodology of the project, chosen as the result of the overall Lean school participants’ opinion poll, was awarded memorable gifts by the UIC OBORONPROM Corporate University.

Intensive, active and fruitful work of all the participants of the Lean school has proven the right choice of the training format chosen by the organizers of the event and allowed to create a Lean school slogan: ‘Training together while working together’.

Andrey Reus, head of UIC OBORONPROM took part in the general discussion of the projects submitted by the teams. According to Mr. Reus: ‘evolution of Lean production is one of the corporation’s key tasks that needs to be solved in order to be competitive on the market. We have to institutionalize within our group companies such an organization that would be competitive with the world’s leading manufacturers’.

The third day of the meeting, conducted in the form of a design-analysis seminar, was dedicated to the determination of the outlook for a corporate standard of transforming the production systems of the companies in the ODK and The Russian Helicopters. Upon completion of the Lean school, the UIC OBORONPROM Corporate University awarded five registered ‘Corporate Lean leader’ certificates to Vladimir Chelpanov (Chernyshov engine manufacturing company), Valery Teplov and Sergey Inukov (UMPO), Sergey Nikiforov (PMZ) and Pavel Fetisov (NPO Saturn). By doing so, the Corporate University had acknowledged the significant contribution of these Lean practitioners to the improvement of the production systems of their respective companies.

Research and production association Saturn OJSC – an engine-building company specialized in design, manufacture and aftermarket support of gas-turbine engines for military and civil aviation, power-generation and gas-pumping installations, the Navy boats and commercial ships. NPO Saturn OJSC is part of United engine corporation – a 100% subsidiary of the united industrial company OBORONPROM OJSC with the objective of engine-building asset management.