Excerpts from a Avation Week article titled "Lean Business Processes" By Bill Peterson:
Lean has been an invaluable tool in manufacturing for the last 30 years. It also has met great success in aviation MRO, even with MROs’ inherent variations.
However, many of the constraints that still relate to the hangar or shop floor are not actually in the hangar or on the shop floor; rather, the constraints are in the back office business processes. Even when aviation maintenance technicians have completed their 5S’s and other Lean tools to improve their processes, we often find them waiting—waiting for assignments, information, paperwork and tooling—or waiting for management decisions to be made.
Pardon the pun, but it’s high time to apply Lean to aviation MRO on a whole new plane.
Finding the waste and bottlenecks in business processes and applying Lean countermeasures can reduce turnaround times dramatically. Read More
