Did you know, one of the fortune 500 companies – which is a leading courier service company, was able to save thousands of man-hours and $2 billion USD just by implementing Lean Management?
In the year 2008, when the world was facing a great recession period, this organization decided to deploy Lean Management strategies to eliminate waste and reduce its costs. The company, which is typically known for delivery of the mails and packages is also committed towards the maintenance of its aircraft which it uses for the delivering deliveries across the world.
For the maintenance, the MRO team performed bulk aircraft repairs. The MRO – maintenance, repair and operations team which also conducted one of the major services – C-checks, which also meant the relative maintenance of the aircraft. The C-checks services are one of the costliest and most time-consuming services. The company used to get this service done across the world in all the countries where its express facilities were provided. Amongst all of those, let us talk about one of its one such services of LA in the USA.
Continual Improvement using Lean Strategies
Before implementing Lean, the crew of the company was able to complete around 14 C-checks a year. But after implementing Lean, the crew has reached at a point where it could complete 30 C-checks a year. Before the implementation of Lean, the C-checks used to take around 32,715 man-hours a year. But after implementing the improvement changes, now the crew can complete the exact same numbers of C-checks within 21,535 man-hours.
The actual man-hour was cut short by the help of one investigator that found that on an average, the employees spent around 1.3 to 2.4 hours each day walking to recover the parts. Because of this, there was seen a lot of delays in the service and repair. Due to which the company had to outsource its C-checks with the third party MROs, which used to cost the company around $2 Billion per project. But now after implementing Lean, within a year, the company saw a drop in wasted time to 0.47 to 1.3 hours a day. Which has saved the company $2 Billion as the C-check is now performed by the internal staff only.
As you can see, the lean management strategies are not just implemented or beneficial to any specific industry or sector. It is used by progressive companies to eliminate the wasted and reduce its external cost  and by using its resource at its full capacity.
Be it large or small, the organizations across the world have been deploying continual improvement frameworks and seeing fruitful results. Have you rolled out continual improvement journey yet?
Compiled by Faber Priyal & Faber Mayuri
