Operational Excellence within an Aircraft Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul Organization with Alex Carroll
Babcock is excited to announce that Alex Carroll, Babcock Canada’s Head of Engineering Continuous Improvement, will be instructing a course at this year’s Central Aircraft Maintenance Engineer Association (CAMEA) Symposium, taking place in Winnipeg on March 5th and 6th.
The CAMEA Symposium aims to provide an innovative forum where Aircraft Maintenance Engineers (AMEs) may congregate to discuss the latest topics and best practices within the field. This event also provides the opportunity to promote and develop the knowledge, skill and proficiency of AMEs.
This year’s event will include Alex Carroll’s course, “Operational Excellence within an AMO / MRO Organisation”, which will address how to optimize operations within aircraft maintenance, repair, and overhaul organizations. Attendees of this course will also receive a Lean Yellow Belt certification which will recognize participants’ awareness and understanding of Lean operational methods.
For over 30 years, Babcock has provided Aerial Emergency Services, and maintained aerial fleets across the globe. This experience makes us uniquely qualified to assist our stakeholders to uphold operational excellence in all their maintenance, repair, and overhaul needs.
Operations excellence faces 3 prevalent and pervasive challenges: waste, variability and slow throughput times. Waste includes anything in the production process that does not add value to the customer, variability being disruptions in production uniformity, and throughput time is the time between orders being received and delivered. One of the most effective ways to manage these inefficiencies is to implement Lean Six Sigma operational practices.
Lean Six Sigma is a methodology of operations, it strives to eliminate defects in products, processes, and services. The name, Six Sigma, refers to the operational target of defects being six standard deviations from the statistical mean of a repeated process. This target indicates that an organization using Six Sigma aims for less than 3.4 defects per million opportunities; guaranteeing production excellence, with only a 0.00033% chance of producing a defect. Six Sigma also acts as a performance measure of a company’s ability to control the occurrences of defects.
Implementing Lean Six Sigma operational practices and tools to reduce defects produces a wide range of benefits for an organization. Streamlined processes create an efficient and nimble operation that can respond to the rapidly evolving environment of aerial maintenance, repair and overhaul. The removal of waste and defects from the operational process also improves an organization’s bottom-line, research has shown that every dollar invested in Six Sigma practices by organizations has returned an average of more than $2 in savings.
An integral step to implementing Lean Methods to Babcock’s operations was to optimize our space by reorganizing our workshops aligned with a Lean design. This included, for example, rearranging the layout of our tool stores to include clean visual fields and to decrease technician process time. The tools were organized by usage and function, every necessary tool was designated a specific place, and all unnecessary items were removed from the work station. This simple change in tool layout saved an average of eight minutes productive time per technician searching for tools each day, saving Babcock 384 hours per year following the reorganization. Using the Lean Methods, Babcock has been able to deliver nearly $3 million (CAD) in savings.
Alex Carroll’s course will provide a wealth of information regarding the implementation of Lean Six Sigma practices within the AME community. Alex will demonstrate how Babcock, as an industry leader, is at the forefront of aerial maintenance operational excellence using Lean Methods.
Register to attend the CAMEA Symposium: https://camea.regfox.com/25th-annual-aviation-symposium
