The Application Of Lean Management To The Aircraft Maintenance Of Gansu Maintenance Dept.,Eastern Airlines

Lean production was first created by the Japanese company, Toyota in the 1950s to reduce all kinds of waste in the production process by enforcing improving measures in each individual step of the production. It aims at reducing costs, improving productivity, and supplying the best. As lean production is becoming increasingly popular and adopted by more and more industries, lean thinking, the theoretical basis of lean production, is spreading from manufacture industry to others and developing into the lean management pattern, the broadest sense of lean production, which widely uses lean thinking as its guideline. With the intense competition in the airlines transportation market, the airlines was forced to reduce costs while raise their service abilities in recent years. Aircraft maintenance is one of the important parts of airlines management, the result of which will have direct effect on airlines operation costs. Therefore, each aircraft maintenance company has to improve their works. China eastern airlines Gansu maintenance department has got great success in high level aircraft schedule check by lean management. The practice of Gansu maintenance department has proved that lean management is important for aircraft maintenance enterprise.This paper first describes the background and concepts of lean management, and then analyzes both the characteristics of aircraft maintenance and the cause of the problems in aircraft maintenance of gansu maintenance department. It points out that Gansu maintenance department should raise its managing ability by improving management model and puts forwards the lean management model in Gansu maintenance department. In order to explain how to apply lean management in aircraft maintenance, this paper, using Gansu department C-check work as a specific example, introduces some lean tools such as value stream analysis and using kanban. Moreover, this paper summarizes the success in lean management of Gansu department and points out the problems to be settled.This paper is meant to prove that, by applying lean management, aircraft maintenance enterprise could raise productivity and reduce maintenance cost, as well as retain high-level maintenance service. Based on the previous research, this paper analyzes the applying of some lean tools and summarizes the key points and general model of lean management in aircraft maintenance company, which will benefit the enforcement of lean management in aircraft maintenance enterprises.