How a leading aerospace manufacturer cut WIP by 18%
This leading aerospace manufacturer partnered with Pelico to tackle supply chain disruptions head-on. Starting with six production controllers in one plant, it grew to 120 users across seven teams and two plants in nine months: a silent transformation that cut WIP by 18%, halved logistics cycle times, and raised team productivity by 80%.
The starting point
Year-over-year growth
25%
Of revenue blocked by part shortages
37%
Of delivery delays due to part shortages
64%
Spent on adjustments to factory disruptions
198 h/day
Challenges
The challenges
For this manufacturer of flight actuators, securing revenue and ensuring on-time delivery was becoming more and more difficult. Late supplier deliveries, part shortages, quality issues, and specific customer requests hit the factory every day. A single disruption could touch more than 300,000 data points and seven teams that had to coordinate.
- Supply chain disruptions: daily, last-minute disruptions kept teams in constant firefighting mode.
- Inefficient data management: process latency, inaccurate data, and ill-suited tools made every daily adjustment harder.
- Cross-functional coordination: siloed data and competing objectives made team alignment complicated.
- Stress and frustration among teams: overtime, cognitive workload, and surprises in production took their toll.
- Forecasting issues: without reliable forecasts, teams struggled to justify results in front of leadership.
Objectives
The objectives
The global objective: leave the parallel universe of spreadsheets, streamline cross-functional collaboration, and improve overall factory performance.
- Streamline cross-functional collaboration.
- Improve data-driven decision-making.
- Improve on-time deliveries.
- Increase team productivity.
- Reduce WIP and logistics cycle times.
The Fix
The fix
To keep the change smooth and time-efficient, the manufacturer opted for an iterative approach, starting with a team of production controllers in one plant. Pelico embedded itself in existing routines and deployed progressively to support each team’s processes. For production controllers, Pelico’s Manufacturing Orchestration Platform provides a dynamic multi-level line of balance for material coverage, to spot bottlenecks across BOM levels.
Other teams then adopted Pelico for their own processes, and the Escalation Room played a major part in the quick adoption. At every step, Pelico supported the data work and collaborated with IT.
- Solutions: Material coverage, MRO
- Initial scope: 1 plant, 6 production controllers
- Global scope: 2 plants, 120 users, 7 teams (production control, purchasing, supply, quality, engineering, S&OP, customer support)
- Timeline: 9 months from initial to global scope
The results
WIP
-18%
Logistics cycle times
-50%
Pelico users in 9 months
x20
Team members onboarded
120
Team productivity
+80%
Teams onboarded
7
Within nine months, Pelico became a cornerstone of digitized factory operations: 120 users, seven teams, and two factories, with a 97% user adoption rate. Within a few weeks of deployment, MRO teams halved their logistics cycle times and cut WIP by 18%, and team productivity rose by 80%. Powered by real-time data and collaboration, the team moved beyond the confines of spreadsheets to collaborative management of factory disruptions.
See what Pelico could do for you
Wondering how Pelico could help your operation? Read the full case study (PDF), or bring your operational reality to a demo.
