Process improvement of global supply chain of commercial aircraft operations

Air transportation demand is predicted to double by 2037. As a result, the demand for new commercial aircraft has reached historic records reaching 10k aircrafts in the next 10 years. Top-tier suppliers of aircraft engine parts are distributed over various countries in Asia and the Middle East. These suppliers ship their parts to be assembled in the USA. When a part is critical to the manufacturer, it is flagged and placed on a priority list to alert the supplier. High priority part needs to be shipped on the next flight out (NFO). If an NFO shipment doesn’t arrive to the USA within 3 days, production lines may shut down, which results in unfulfilled demands. This can cause the aircraft engine provider to pay millions of dollars in compensations. It was found that 60% of the NFO shipments have a transit time of 4 days or more for the provider understudy. The purpose of this research paper is to investigate the supply chain in order to decrease the transit time of NFO shipments using process improvement principles. After further investigation, it was discovered that about 35% of the current average transit time was spent on waiting at the shipping and receiving country’s airports.