PEMCO Aviation, the Tampa-based aviation MRO and conversion company, hosted a Lean Summit earlier this week at its Tampa International Airport headquarters. The conference was designed to share process improvement, organizational change and best practices with the overall objective of improving aviation safety.
Attendees included representatives of several U.S. airlines and focused on the standard Lean principles of “sort," "set in order," "shine," "standardize," and "sustain." PEMCO’s model contains an extra S (6S) for Safety-focused on both the aircraft and employees.
The summit was moderated by Ben Macre, PEMCO’s Director of Lean.
Long a part of the automotive industry, Lean is a culture and philosophy first introduced by Toyota that is designed to eliminate waste while introducing fresh and innovative ways to improve processes.
Upon being named PEMCO Chief Executive Officer in May 2015, Pastor Lopez initiated a Lean program that mapped out the company’s existing value stream and identified non-value-add activities in the MRO and conversion processes. Lopez brought together employees from diverse functional areas to contribute to the project. Since that time different groups tackle different projects each month based on the original value stream mapping.
“Our Lean process has been a resounding success for PEMCO and I wanted our partners to witness our transformation first-hand,” said Lopez. “The aviation industry has not been pro-active in the area of Lean and it was my hope that attendees would share their best practices and return to their companies with thoughts and ideas on how they could advance Lean internally. I was very encouraged by the openness and the transparent discussions that took place during the summit.”
About PEMCO World Air Services
With five decades of proven maintenance and engineered services to commercial air carriers worldwide, PEMCO is an undisputed world leader in the MRO market providing turnkey maintenance for aircraft operators.
PEMCO is also a world leader in the passenger-to-freighter conversions with 60+ customers in 25+ countries, an unequalled 125+ B737-300/400s in service, and over 2 million hours of safe reliable operations. PEMCO is headquartered in Tampa, Florida with partner operations in Asia, Latin America and Canada. For more information, please visit www.pemcoair.com or call +1-813-322-9600.
