Aircraft Production Process Improvement & Supply Chain Transformation

An Australian division of a global civilian and military aircraft manufacturer. The Australian division was responsible for the manufacturing of two aircraft platforms and the through life support (sustainment) of these aircraft - deeper maintenance and supply chain. Operational maintenance was conducted by the client.

The Australian division was experiencing significant issues with the performance and management of its global supply chain as well as with its production processes. This was driving poor delivery and sustainment outcomes and low customer satisfaction. An assessment of the production process identified the process area where the blockages were occurring. An assessment of the supply chain identified over 80 key failure modes which resulted in the transformation program initiation.

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Our Maestro was engaged to lead a number of the program streams with the core focus on process improvement, inventory management, SAP uplift and performance reporting.

The failure modes were consolidated into 7 program streams; the Maestro was accountable for 4.

• Aircraft Production
  
  • Alignment of ‘Flight-Line’ turn-around times to program schedules
  • Review of current production resourcing
  • Ensure issue and defect accountability owned at point of origin/occurrence
• Inventory management
  
  • Deliver inventory reductions
  • Reduced shelf-life derived wastage
  • Improve demand satisfaction and meet contractual baselines
• SAP Data Governance – This was focused on over 17000 material master data records (over 3.4 million data elements)
  
  • Improved data quality by 40%
  • Improved data compliance by 60%
  • Implement a data governance framework, with defined roles and responsibilities and segregation of duties
• Performance Reporting – Standardise and automate
  
  • Agreement with Head Office as to the KPIs and measure points to ensure consistency
  • Refine current SAP reports and identify additional reports
  • Develop data cube and queries with live table links to SAP reports as well asoperational data bases
  • Develop Tableau front end for data visualisation
  • Reduction in time and resources to create and deliver the Supply Chain reports

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This fractional role was led by one of our Maestros.

Aircraft Production

• The project saw a reduction in ‘Flight-Line’ turn-around times from 154 days (average) to 62 days which improved customer satisfaction. It also resulted in the removal of extra shift production saving $8M PA. The Flight-line lead at one point was seen as the cause of the bottleneck, the project highlighted the root causes which also resulted in the Flight-line lead receiving executive-level support to refuse an aircraft at the quality gate if it was non-compliant.

Inventory Management

• The project delivered a reduction (over 40%) in inventory holdings and a write-back in excess of $14M, it saw a reduction in wastage due to shelf-life expiry over (90%) resulting in a saving of over $300K per annum.
• Holding the right amounts of the correct part resulted in an increased demand satisfaction of over 40%, which also exceeded contractual baseline requirements.

SAP Data Governance

• The project delivered the data governance framework, in it application it saw an uplift in material master data quality of over 40% and compliance uplift of over 60% and the removal of duplicate master data records.

Performance Reporting

• The project delivered agreed KPIs and the reduction in time and resources to create and deliver the Supply Chain reports from 2 weeks to 3 days as well as the reduction in resourcing from 3 to 1 resource.