The challenge
A UK-based aerospace MRO facility was under increasing commercial pressure to reduce aircraft turnaround time. Customer contracts specified penalty clauses for late delivery, and the organisation was regularly exceeding target turnaround by 15 to 25 per cent. The operation ran 24/7 across multiple shifts, with complex aircraft requiring hundreds of individual task cards, inspections, and sign-offs before release to service.
Initial management assumptions pointed to resource constraints — not enough engineers, not enough tooling, not enough bay capacity. However, a closer look at the data suggested the problem was not capacity but flow.
Our approach
We began at Gemba — spending time on the hangar floor across all shifts, observing how work actually moved through the MRO process. What we found was characteristic of complex MRO environments: significant waiting time between work packages, inconsistent handovers between shifts, parts kitting delays that left engineers idle, and a planning process that front-loaded work into the first days of each visit without smoothing the schedule across the full turnaround window.
Working alongside the operations team, we mapped the value stream for the most common aircraft type. The map revealed that value-adding work — actual hands-on engineering — represented approximately 22 per cent of total turnaround time. The remaining 78 per cent was waiting, transport, rework, and administrative delay.
We designed targeted interventions: a revised planning method that levelled work across the turnaround window, a kitting system that ensured parts and tooling were staged before each shift, a structured handover protocol that reduced cross-shift information loss, and daily management routines that made turnaround progress visible to all teams.
The results
Within four months, average turnaround time had reduced by 30 per cent. Cross-shift handover quality improved measurably, with a 60 per cent reduction in shift-start queries and reconfirmation requests. More importantly, the daily management routines we established gave the team the tools to sustain these gains independently.
The improvements did not require additional headcount or capital investment. They came from removing the waste in how work was planned, sequenced, and communicated — exactly the kind of improvement that Lean thinking is designed to deliver.