Collinear Group has applied Aurora’s intelligent scheduling and critical chain project management (CCPM) to the maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) of commercial aircraft. MRO is a complex domain, with much unpredictability due to the fact that the exact scope and specific requirements are never fully realized until the aircraft has been fully inspected. Aurora, is designed to handle this emergent work, by determining how best to synchronize and allocate resources. Aurora’s intelligence and ability to explain its reasoning has led to greater transparency into the execution of MRO projects and greater efficiencies.
The following lists some of the complexities inherent to MRO (Pains) that Aurora addresses:
- Inherent “discovery”/uncertainty during MRO kills traditional scheduling – you’re always behind – that hurts morale and ability to prioritize and manage effectively.
- Difficult to adapt quickly – rescheduling/reprioritizing historically has taken a long time: discovery made → analysis and rescheduling → dispatch work → get back to work cycle is too long
- Traditional Metrics/Measures (job completion actuals vs. planned, job completion burn downs, job completion rates, % completes) are not aligned and do not drive the right behaviors for adaptability/flexibility/speed required in the MRO space
- Razor thin profit margins
- Turn Around Time (TAT) is key. All performance measures need to align to this
- “Everything is a one off” – no plane is ever the same no matter how hard we try to predict ahead of time what work has to get done
- Management and analysts chasing bad metrics and analysis and resulting reporting vs. keeping value added work happening on the shop floor
- Keeping labor resources at a minimum (main cost driver) instead of enabling better throughput/TAT
- Scarce and often shared equipment resources
- Generalist labor resources are best to be able to perform a variety of manufacturing operations, problem solve and be adaptable to whatever Discovery occurs – these types of resources are scarce/constrained and should be planned for
The following lists some of the real-world benefits to MRO (Gains) that Aurora provides:
- Decreased Turn Around Time (TAT)
- Digital Solutions that can transfer easily to hardcopy (print) given varying maturities of “digital readiness” amongst their workforce
- Decreased planning/scheduling spend and/or turn over, due to poor tools/methods
- Less Manager/Lead guesswork when dealing with unplanned events, more rapid detection/identification/rescheduling/dispatching of new scheduling/priorities
- Enabling pooled resourcing across the hanger to keep labor resources adding value as discovery is made on any particular plane
- Rapid Issue Resolution, Rescheduling (reprioritization), and ReDispatch of work
- Unplanned parts/materials requirements – rapid communication and rescheduling
- Rapid and prioritized Redeployment of resource pools to maintain Hangar/global/system level KPIs like Turn Around Time