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 M White is Chair of TOCICO and a senior leader at WiseTech Global, where he works across enterprise delivery, organisational capability and education. Over a career spanning more than 30 years, he has led major projects and transformation initiatives across defence, logistics and technology in Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States and Saudi Arabia. Simon is a long-standing Theory of Constraints practitioner, speaker and advocate, with a particular interest in helping organisations see the system clearly, identify what is genuinely limiting performance, and improve flow. His work is grounded in a simple belief: capable people usually do not need fixing, but the systems around them often do.