Aircraft Turnaround Process

In this example we show an aircraft turnaround process from touchdown to take off. Please note this is not a real turnaround process and as the author, although I am a frequent flyer, I am no aircraft expert! I have used this process as an example in many training sessions. It is something that is recognizable to most people and brings together a lot of different interacting processes.

The story I like to tell is of the importance of a quick turnaround to the airline, while maintaining the extremely high levels of safety. What’s interesting with this process is all the interacting service providers that are all following their own processes. The baggage handlers, the fuel company, the catering and cleaners are often likely to all work for different companies.

In this case the purpose of the process is to orchestrate all these other processes. This is increasingly relevant today as most companies operate in a similar way, we may have a single value adding process, but so much of what we do is orchestrating our suppliers in order to output a product.

When we start the discussion the process sounds very complicated. There seems to be so much going on. So it helps to demonstrate how useful the process decomposition approach is for identifying details that might otherwise be missed. It helps the group break the major tasks down and think about how they interact. Each level of detail revealing something that was previously hidden.

In this example I have used Notes and Markdown to create the headline and to add images. To find out more about how to do this click the Keyboard Shortcuts link in the application.

View the live skore for the aircraft turnaround process here.