Aircraft Manufacturing:

A mid-west aircraft manufacturing company, with sales exceeding $3 billion called for assistance to improve their current business system. They had an immediate need to reduce their operating costs. A significant down turn in sales of business jets and personal piston aircraft, added to the need for swift action. A Metasystems’ Senior Business Analyst was engaged to reduce inventory investment, eliminate material shortages, and participate at the corporate level in developing a manufacturing strategy to drastically reduce operating costs and manufacturing cycle time.

In only 4 months, our Consultant was able to reduce their final assembly line shortages and their “make-to-stock” inventory by $85 million. During this period he was assigned the added responsibility of consolidating and managing their production and inventory management functions, with the challenge of improving their SAP system data and physical inventory accuracy.

Our Business Analyst, acting as the Manager of Production and Inventory Management, was able to make significant improvements in several problem areas:

• A Sales and Operations process was implemented to provide the ||company with a stable and accurate master schedule.
• An integrated planning process was put in place to address the ||quarterly and annual operating objectives of the Finance, Sales, and ||Operations Departments.
• System data integrity was improved by restructuring the ||responsibilities for data management to focused cross-functional ||teams thereby significantly reducing update access by as much as ||500%.
• Inventory accuracy increased by 30% through implementing a ||company wide improvement plan that addressed: stockroom security, ||consolidating and reorganizing stockrooms, cycle counting processes, ||enhancement of system features and intensifying training. As a ||member of the company’s strategic management team, our Senior

Business Analyst worked with senior managers and manufacturing consultants from around the corporation to develop a plan, utilizing lean manufacturing principles, to reduce business process cycle times by 50%, inventory investment by $200 million and overhead by one third.