Excerpted from: Stars and Stripes Pacific edition, Sunday, July 1, 2007 in an article by Jimmy Norris
YONGSAN GARRISON, South Korea —
The 8th U.S. Army held a ceremony last week to celebrate the certification of its newest Six Sigma “green belts.”Certified green belt Joseph Rushing, a work supervisor at the Materiel Support Center-Korea, explained his green belt project which was to investigate why MSC-K’s battery shop had a backlog of about 3,000 batteries waiting to be recharged and put into tactical vehicles.
The battery shop processed about 16,000 depleted batteries a year, of which about 75 percent were unserviceable. Records showed many batteries depleted quickly after being put back into vehicles.
“We also charged the full price to the vehicle expenses, as if it was a new battery, but we had no guarantee on them,” said Rushing. “Many used batteries would only last three to five months, but procedure dictated that we couldn’t get rid of them as long as they would take a charge.
”Rushing said the situation was costing about $270,000 a year in person-hours to produce batteries that could fail.He said the problem was solved last November when, instead of recharging the used batteries, the shop began selling them to a contractor for a gain of about about $9,000.
Now the battery shop no longer handles used batteries. With the backlog eliminated, they were able to reduce the processing time on a new battery from nine days to three, a 2/3 savings of all battery shop man-hours.
The shop, which had been allocated three employees, had actually been using a total of six to keep up with work load — three of whom were borrowed from other sections within MSC-K. Rushing said the new processed eliminated the backlog which allowed the shop to release the borrowed workers to sections of MSC-K with a greater need. The battery shop will document a savings of about 8760 man-hours of labor per year.
