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When the company addressed the real problem, the per-airplane assembly cost decreased by 45% in one year.

After realizing this immediate benefit, the company pursued Ventana's suggestion that redesigning the airplane to simplify assembly could significantly reduce both the assembly cost, and the sensitivity of assembly operations to labor experience. Over the long term, the company demonstrated the effectiveness of reducing part counts and simplifying assembly operations in each of twelve engineering and manufacturing projects, and the "design for assembly" initiative became the key contributor to the success of an important subsequent aircraft program.

Aircraft fleet sparing

Text Box: Ventana, working with a major defense contractor, developed a system to manage logistics for a US Air Force fleet of aircraft. The Air Force recognized that the ongoing task of finding and fixing data errors was the most challenging aspect of their logistics management activities. To meet the challenge, Ventana developed a data cleaning and logistics optimization system. The system combines a central database that facilitates changing, documenting, resolving differences and maintaining accountability for changes in the data, with a model of how parts status affects logistics system performance. By comparing model predictions to measured performance and automatically tracing the parts most responsible for the difference, the system identifies the data errors with highest impact on performance.

Text Box: Evidence for the effectiveness of the system has emerged from real world tests. In a key exercise in December, 2000, twenty-five asset managers were relieved of normal duties for a week to clean the fleet data using conventional techniques. After this exercise, it took an analyst only five minutes with the Ventana system to sort through data on tens of thousands of parts and find twenty new errors, each of which was more significant to logistics performance than the errors identified conventionally. Most of the errors located the conventional way would have made little difference in calculating optimal numbers and locations of parts. On the other hand, without first correcting the twenty additional errors, any asset optimization would have been ludicrously inaccurate.