Late in the year of 2010 the researcher was approached by the Director Maintenance of XYZ Cargo. The researcher and the Director Maintenance had known each other for nearly a decade. Both have a professional background in procurement and logistics and had been working on spare parts topics together in the past. As the Director Maintenance was aware of the researcher’s work on the issue of spare parts management in the aviation industry, he took the chance to ask her to support him in a real world problem which coincidently matched with the topic the researcher had set out to cover in her thesis.
Researcher and Director Maintenance agreed that the researcher would try to solve the problem XYZ Cargo was facing using Action Research. As discussed in Chapter 3.5, this implied that the researcher would get actively involved in the operational business (McKay and Marshall 2001) and would be allowed to manipulate the processes currently applied in XYZ Cargo. In return, the Director Maintenance guaranteed unlimited access to all required data and people in the company. In order to protect sensitive company information, the real company name was disguised as “XYZ Cargo”. All company data was obscured in a way that e.g. financial figures used hereafter, present a certain percentage of the values. However, the following description of XYZ Cargo accurately reflects the company researched for this project.
Europe based XYZ Cargo was founded in 2008 and performed its maiden flight mid 2009. The current fleet consists of 4 Boeing freighter aircraft type B747- 400F.
The company operates scheduled and chartered services from its homebase in Europe mainly to Asia, Africa and South America. On these long-haul flights all types of cargo are transported. Some freight is perishable and/or time-critical requiring ultimate schedule adherence, whereas other is less critical with customers willing to agree to a looser schedule.
With a multinational team of approximately 140 people, XYZ Cargo’s working language is English. Therefore all research was conducted in English.
Field work was conducted between January 2011 and May 2012 when the researcher spent more than 8 weeks on the shop floor with Action Research.
The project plan in Appendix C gives an overview about the project phases and their temporal spread.
From XYZ Cargo the following people were part of the research: (1) The Director Maintenance with more than 30 years technical as well as purchasing and logistics experience in aviation was the primary contact for the researcher, as well as the sponsor of the research project within the company; (2) One Engineer with about 5 years experience provided technical input on the aircraft and the spare parts; (3) The Purchasing and Logistics Manager with 8 years experience and her team of 3 inexperienced (less than 18 months) Purchasing
&Logistics clerks 1,2, and 3 provided input on the purchasing and logistics processes in the company.
The organisation was set up in a way that not only the Engineering department, but also the purchasing and logistics department reported to the Director Maintenance. This very much facilitated researcher’s access to the people and their availability.
The course of the field work detailed hereafter is displayed in Exhibit 4.1
This illustration shows the structure of the field work. As pointed out in Chapter 4.1, the field work started with clarification of the initial situation. From there the Action Research cycle 1 started. Each cycle consisted of the following
consecutive states: diagnosing - planning action - taking action - evaluating. If the evaluating stage showed that the action planned and taken did not provide the desired outcomes, this triggered another cycle. Exemption to this process
can be seen in cycle 2 which ended with the planning stage. Reasons for this will be delivered throughout this chapter. All 4 Action Research cycles were conducted with XYZ Cargo. Cycle 3 already showed the desired outcome during the evaluating stage: the company’s Technical Dispatch Reliability improved significantly and the spare part stock value met budget requirements.
However, not all factors derived during cycle 3 had been applied. Therefore, in cycle 4 the factor “intuition” was additionally applied. Here, the company’s Technical Dispatch Reliability improved compared to the previous measuring period and outperformed the competition. The spare parts stock value was below budget. The importance of intuition for decision making was confirmed by e.g. Agor (1986), Dane and Pratt (2007), Sadler-Smith and Shefy (2004) and Hodgkinson et al (2009a, 2009b) as discussed in the literature review in Chapter 2.14.
For XYZ Cargo the action research has worked out very successfully. From the client’s perspective all work was done. The evaluation at the end of cycle 4 would have been a natural end point, only followed by a critical review of the research undertaken by the researcher in the course of this thesis.
However, from a scientific point of view it was considered necessary to find evidence supporting the findings from XYZ Cargo. Therefore, additional field work was planned and carried out. Experts from other cargo airlines were approached to comment on spare parts inventory management and the
research undertaken at XYZ Cargo. Evidence from the interviews supported the findings from XYZ Cargo, especially highlighting the positive influence of
intuition on spare parts inventory decisions.
Details of the research will be discussed in the chapters mentioned in this Exhibit 4.1.
Exhibit 4.1 Course of Field W ork