By Rob Michell, Operations Manager
The challenge of designing and building custom engineered equipment that is capable of testing a variety of aircraft/engine accessories to meet each customer's unique expectations is daunting. This challenge requires a very organized approach to planning and monitoring each project. In this article I'll provide an overview of how Bauer approaches project management and how we continually learn from our experiences and fold that back into improving our process.
Our project management process can be broken down into three main phases:
- Kick-off
- War Room
- Close-out
The kick-off phase of any project begins with the receipt of a customer order. We respond to this event by scheduling a series of kick-off meetings to accomplish the following:
- Review the order and get a basic understanding of the project requirements
- Assign engineers based on applicable experience and availability
- Provide a hand-off of information about the project from the Bauer sales person to the assigned engineers
- Establish a project plan (schedule)
- Confirm availability of resources to support the plan
Once our kick-off process is complete, design, materials procurement, and manufacturing efforts begin. These aspects of the project are managed primarily through a process we call the War Room. Each new project is given a status board in our War Room. The status board contains several key documents that help us track the status of each project.
These documents are maintained by the project engineer and our project management team members.
The board documents include a "daily bullet", milestone dates list, project schedule (Gantt chart), and budget status graph.
Three days each week, key managers and engineers converge on the War Room for a very fast-paced exchange of information. Each project engineer presents their "daily bullet" for their assigned projects. Questions are asked and answered by production, materials, quality, engineering, and contracts. As a result of these meetings, action items are identified and tracked by the project management team, with follow-up being checked at subsequent War Room meetings. Based on this interaction, project plans are updated and actions taken to keep them moving toward a successful completion.
The final phase of our project management process spans the time period from when we host a customer visit for factory acceptance through the completion of final commissioning of the equipment at the customer's facility. This close-out phase includes addressing any of the issues or concerns that might have been identified during the factory acceptance visit and tracking that these issues are addressed prior to shipment of the equipment. We then make the required plans to support the installation of the equipment to be followed typically by a start-up and training visit by our technical team. Again, we track the resolution of any issues that may come up during this final acceptance visit. Lastly, we hold a close-out meeting with the Bauer project team members to review what, if anything, we would do differently to improve the quality of the equipment and level of service to our customer. This information is once again fed back into our process and engineering standards.
Because our projects represent a very real challenge, we continue to look for ways to improve our ability to meet the delivery timetables desired by our customers. We see this as a never-ending process and continue working to pleasantly surprise our customers with exceptional performance whenever possible.