Today, all sectors of the Aerospace and Defense industry are fighting a global battle to attain competitive advantage and gain market share.  There are several factors that if addressed will provide the competitive advantage everyone is searching for:

• Cost reduction, performance improvement and the ability to increase productivity and output across the entire supply chain is a key ingredient in winning in the market place.  Most aerospace companies are still not on par with other industries as measured by time-to-market, inventory management, cost control, and asset management.  
  
  
• The nature of the industry is a low volume / high mix manufacturing environment, and few in the industry have mastered the key factors that drive profitability.  One such key factor is operational flexibility, in particular, the need for rapid and frequent changeover of machines and tooling.  This has proven to be a difficult technique to master and remains a barrier to maximizing profit.  If not properly managed, this requirement can result in underutilized resources, long lead times, low ship-to-request rates, high inventory, poor customer satisfaction, and ultimately, loss of revenue and margin.
  
  
• Companies designing and manufacturing products in relatively short time horizons will gain competitive advantage.  Because of the complexity of the products and the length of the supply chain, this takes on a dimension not seen in other industries.  In particular the inefficient movement of material through the supply chain leads to “marching army” costs, leading to margin erosion. 
  
  
• The spare parts and aftermarket support requirements for the aerospace industry exceed even that of the automotive industry.   The management of high technology parts and services has become increasingly complex and is consequently more costly.  Change can occur due to improvements in design, advances in technology, changes in manufacturing processes, or improvements in safety.  As a result, parts in the field may need to be recalled and replaced by newer configurations; this is a major cost driver. 

BLMC has helped Aerospace and Defense companies improve manufacturing and supply chain processes, as well as develop successful customer service strategies.  This includes the statistical buffering of spare parts to minimize inventory, reducing the mean time to repair, and lowering customer response time.  We have had substantial success in reducing raw material inventory as well as the amount of time that procurement has to spend on managing the thousands of part numbers typically linked to the service business.  We have helped clients simplify their manufacturing and service processes using lean manufacturing techniques to reduce cycle time, and increase capacity to generate substantial improvements in profitability and revenue.