Spirit AeroSystems Streamlines Program Management with Smarter Processes

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Spirit AeroSystems is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of aerostructures for commercial airplanes, defense platforms, and business jets, growing significantly over the past 15 years.

“We started in 2006 primarily as a commercial airplane manufacturing company,” says David Graddy, IT Business Analyst at Spirit AeroSystems. “Since then, we’ve ventured into manufacturing for Airbus, as well as regional business and corporate jets. We’re a company that’s constantly growing—in 2014, we stepped into the defense industry to diversify our services and in the last three years we’ve expanded into the aftermarket business. Now, we’re a truly global company with a global footprint.”

Recently, Spirit AeroSystems has restructured its organization to diversify its business even further. Over the next few years, it’ll be focusing on key areas such as the recovery of narrow-body aircrafts, bringing more affordable space systems into the market, and partnering with Airbus to develop the wings of CityAirbus NextGen—Airbus’ all-electric VTOL multicopter.

Managing the Who, What and When of Business Transactions

Spirit AeroSystems’ worldwide reputation is due to its ability to deliver consistently successful, large-scale projects. And with a keen ambition for growth, the company wanted to upgrade its project management tools to scale its services even further.

“We decided as a company that we wanted to look for the ultimate earned value management tool,” explains Charlene Randall, EVM Specialist and Senior Business Analyst at Spirit AeroSystems. “Previously, we were using a legacy project management tool, but we found it wasn’t allowing us the capacity for growth. We would work through a lot of operations and hit server capacity and performance issues.”

Along with these challenges, the team often ran into problems such as values not appearing in logs correctly and frequent data anomalies.

Working closely with Deltek, Charlene and her team mapped out their project management requirements and found three solutions that were a perfect fit—Deltek Cobra, PM Compass and Acumen Fuse.

“We use Deltek Cobra for our cost management and reporting, while PM Compass helps us keep a complete audit trail of the changes we’ve made across our organization,” explains David. “Our previous tool didn’t have these capabilities, so the new tools have made us much more effective in how we manage, report and track all our data.”

Clear Audit Trails Across the Organization

One of the most valuable benefits Spirit AeroSystems gains from Deltek’s PPM suite of tools is having a clear view of data across the organization.

“The project management solutions have given us accountability and traceability throughout the business. Through workflows, we can see what’s changed in documentation, when it changed, and who changed it,” says Charlene. “The dashboards provide a means by which program managers and control account managers have dozens of templates at their fingertips to run reports.”

Crucially, these reports are now informed by consistently up-to-date data, helping Spirit AeroSystems’ teams make more accurate decisions across the organization.

“We’re no longer working with reports that were done a week ago—they’re in real time,” adds Charlene. “I haven’t worked with tools like this before, but I’m looking forward to learning more as we grow with Deltek’s tools.”

Standardized Processes for Easier Program Management

By combining Deltek’s Cobra and PM Compass solutions, Spirit AeroSystems has also been able to create greater standardization and consistency across its operations—no matter who’s working on a specific project.

“Both of these tools have allowed us to create standard processes that make it much easier to manage programs,” explains Charlene. “It means that once our analysts get used to these processes, they’ll be able to go from one program to the other seamlessly—and it gives us the flexibility to comply with customer requirements.”

“Ultimately, they have allowed us to be more effective in what we do and how we support our program management,” adds David.

And the result of greater effectiveness is greater potential.

“Deltek gives us the ability for growth within the defense world, we’re not limited by the number or size of programs,” says Charlene. “And of course, it gives us the ability to show seamless reporting requirements.”

Efficient Program Management Scaled Enterprise Wide

After the success of implementing Cobra and PM Compass, Spirit AeroSystems is now in the process of implementing Deltek Open Plan —an enterprise project scheduling software.

“We’re really looking forward to getting this solution up and running. It’ll allow us to integrate scheduling with PM Compass and Cobra and gain that overarching feel that we have everything in one place,” says Charlene. “The fact that we’ll have all our systems all in one place will allow us to grow and allow our analysts to easily analyze our data.”

“The commercial division of our company is also looking at how it can use Deltek’s tools in some capacity,” adds David. “The potential to take the tool enterprise-wide will be a pretty good feather in our cap.”

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