Many fleet aircraft operators have realized some value and savings by implementing in-house maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) profit centers and/or by outsourcing their aircraft maintenance activities to established MROs. In turn, these MROs are increasingly applying Lean/Six Sigma principles and techniques to their operations to achieve dramatic and sustainable performance improvements.
Unfortunately, most MROs never realize peak effectiveness from these initiatives because they have failed to properly support them with an information technology (IT) solution that provides the broad visibility and effective data needed for true knowledge-based decisions.
Today, MRO operations account for 15 to 18 percent of the fleet aircraft operator’s total operating costs. Aircraft undergoing scheduled-maintenance actions, or aircraft delayed from being returned to service because of scheduled-maintenance actions, also create the need for additional capital expenditures for the spare aircraft needed to meet flight-dispatch schedules. The significance of these costs highlights the MRO industry as a key business area for targeted transformation.
“Lean MRO,” in conjunction with an optimized maintenance program, enables MROs to eliminate nonproductive or unnecessary tasks from their process-event critical paths, improve maintenance team performance, increase the yield of scheduled maintenance actions, and increase supply chain effectiveness. With these enhancements, maintenance teams can maximize information re-use, manage the complexity arising from asset variation, and reduce the time spent performing tangential tasks like information searches and data downloads.
When properly implemented, lean with Six Sigma helps reduce and eliminate the root causes of defects and unwanted process variability. When employed together, the following Lean/Six Sigma principles have the potential to generate significant performance improvements:
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