About this Presentation
BAE Systems maintains planes for the Australian Airforce. BAE used Critical Chain to improve the fighter jet maintenance. Each planned maintenance service is a project in its own right, and you don't know the full scope until you start checking and disabling the plane. Prior to using Critical Chain about 60% of these projects over-ran, by an average of 40%. Their overall on-target performance went from just over 50% to virtually 100%, despite an unexpected increase in workload along the way. Come and find out how they did it!
What Will You Learn
To help you get the most value from this session, we’ve highlighted a few key points. These takeaways capture the main ideas and practical insights from the presentation, making it easier for you to review, reflect, and apply what you’ve learned.
Fighter jet maintenance behaves less like a simple production line and more like a high-variation project environment, where known, anticipated, and unanticipated work all compete for finite manpower, facilities, parts, and tools.
The breakthrough came from treating maintenance flow as a Critical Chain problem: focus on constraints, pipeline work appropriately, use buffers and early warning signals, and align departments around shared priorities instead of local firefighting.
The results were striking. What began from a 40% on-time environment moved to 95% on or ahead of schedule in 2015 deep maintenance turnaround performance, then supported a fleet-wide modification and upgrade program delivered ahead of schedule and on budget.
The session is also candid about sustainment: rules erode, WIP creeps back, priorities get ignored, and managerial commitment is essential if buffer management and shorter cycle times are going to last.
Instructor(s)
Simon White
Simon White works for BAE Systems Australia as Manager of Project Controls. His current role is to ‘Deliver Reliable and Repeatable Project Control’ across a multi-billion dollar portfolio of +220 defense projects, spread over Air, Maritime and Software/Cyber domains. He was part of a successful application of CCPM to an Aerospace MRO environment, and this has been shared widely within the BAE business globally, as well as via TOCICO Global Conference, CCPM Global Conference, Project Control Expo UK and Aus, and more.