Designing a bottom-up Remanufacturing Process Control and Maturity Model for Airline MRO

Abstract

In this day and age sustainability is becoming increasingly important. Even though the airline business is not the first thing which comes to mind when regarding sustainability there are huge efforts in play to extend the life of airplanes and its corresponding components. This is done via remanufacturing. Remanufacturing can here be defined as:” Returning a used product to at least its original performance with a warranty that is equivalent to or better than that of the newly manufactured product” (Gunasekara, et al., 2018). Even though numerous attempts using traditional techniques like Lean have been tried at KLM E&M, none have yielded the long term desired results, which is why a different approach is needed. Remanufacturing brings numerous problems with it, unknown to traditional manufacturing (Guide Jr & Daniel, 2000). These problems result in the operational level of the organisation not having control over the process, which leads to subpar performances. Furthermore, a gap originates between higher level management and the operations, which leaves a lot of potential uncovered as well as discourage operational level progress. The proposed model is designed to help gain control over an uncontrolled process, improve its performance and sustain the newly found control, which is also the purpose of this research. This is all achieved using a more bottom-up integral approach. This proposed model is combined with the operational lean maturity model developed by Maasouman (Maasouman, 2015), in order to create a Remanufacturing Process maturity model, which indicates the maturity level of each aspect used in the Remanufacturing Process control model, resulting in a model which has both quantitative and qualitative aspects.