increased ALTEN’s dependency on highly skilled and experienced people to realise fairly repet-itive activities.

The solution

Based on a weekly input of all relevant data from SAP, Ground lion provides an Adaptive Case Management system via a web platform. The system helps the supply officers to target the items where the risk of short supply is highest, to identify the possible solutions more efficiently and to treat their solution more quickly.

The results

Ground lion consultants mapped out the complex supply chain processes to produce an Adaptive Case Management system, from both a macro and micro perspective, and included the ability to import information from SAP every week.

The initial pilot with 15 supply officers, conducted at the end of 2015, was successful and led to a full roll-out of Ground lion in January 2016. Ground lion has given ALTEN’s supply officers a much-needed overview of the various interac-tions with suppliers, with the potential to identify issues in real time and respond to them quickly. Ground lion integrates the full supply chain flow,

ALTEN at a glanceALTEN, the European leader in engineering consultancy and technology services, provides support for its clients’ development strategies in the fields of innovation, R&D and IT systems.

18 000 talented engineers carry out studies and build and conduct proof-of-concept projects for the technical and information systems divisions of large corporate clients in the industrial, telecommunica-tions and services sectors.

With an annual turnover reaching 1,549,9 €M in 2015 and growing steadily, ALTEN is active in 20 countries, covers the entire development cycle and offers a choice of service levels, from technology consulting to full-blown project outsourcing.

The challenge

About 20% of ALTEN’s current turnover is in aviation and aerospace, a market expected to grow quickly over the next 20 years. 50 dedicated supply officers make sure that all parts for Airbus Helicopters are ordered and delivered on time and in full to the internal production and assembly departments.

ALTEN’s team works with 600 suppliers across the world, managing 60 000 items within seven types of supplies for Airbus Helicopters: mechanical parts, structures, government supply, electronics, after-sales, and former models.

While they could rely on the ERP system of Airbus Helicopters for replenishment planning and purchase order issue, the supply officers were limited to MS Office applications to manage all exceptions in the order to delivery cycle.

The limited system support made it very difficult for the team to track the issues, define the right priorities for action and focus on the exceptions with the highest potential impact on the part availability.

Finally, the low level of system support for these critical and complex exception processes

including quality control and returns.

By adjusting to unpredictable event flows, Ground lion gives supply officers the opportunity to focus on the results they need to achieve, without the need for time-consuming manual searches in SAP. In addition to better manage late deliveries, the system enables the identifi-cation of items that are ready for production, validates where information or certification is missing, and calls out items that cannot be used. The flexible implementation identifies several types of cases which adjust in colour, from green to yellow to red or black, depending on status, for fast identification of items of concern.

To make the performance of ALTEN’s supply team even better, Ground lion has reduced on-boarding time for new supply officers.

Based on its work with Airbus Helicopters, ALTEN sees significant future opportunity to leverage Ground lion to bring these types of efficiencies to other companies in the aviation and aerospace industries and far beyond those sectors.

Ground lion and ALTEN bring timely

information for Supply Chain

Management to Airbus

Helicopters

ALTEN provides Engineering Consulting and Technology services to support industrial manufac-turers around the world. For many years, ALTEN clients have been under pressure from global market trends and new technologies to rethink their product and service supply chains. Organisations must stay innovative, and adapt to the technological breakthroughs in their markets, whilst accessing markets faster, servicing local needs better, and also controlling costs through modular product life cycles.

Because flexibility is at the heart of ALTEN’s DNA, its clients expect its project methodologies to speed up product development at competitive prices with a process of continuous improvement in the fields of on-board electronics, control/command and mechanics. Based on the Capability Maturity Model Integration created by the Software Engineering Institute, ALTEN has been appraised at Level 3, validating that it has in place detailed processes that guide the product life cycle, from conception through delivery and maintenance.

ALTEN engineers support a wide range of clients around the world with their expertise in ground transportation, aviation, aerospace and defence, energy and life sciences, and telecommunications.

It was for these skills and experience that Airbus Helicopters contracted with ALTEN in 2014 to manage and coordinate the mechanical parts supply-chain.

Laurent Lépinoit, ALTEN’s marketing manager, explained the complexity of the process in an interview with a French aviation magazine: “We set up a supply platform of about 60 engineers who manage the timely supply of parts, create indicators and alerts for certain suppliers, implement corrective measures and perform system updates, and keep up with the production rhythm.” He adds that even if aeronautics industries do not manage quite the same scale of volume as the automotive sector, “production has intensified in the past 10 years, and has been transformed into a complex supply chain.”

Following a recommendation made in 2014 by Möbius (the parent company of Ground lion), Ground lion’s Adaptive Case Management system was introduced in 2015 to be used by ALTEN’s Airbus Helicopters Supply Chain officers and rolled out in less than six months.

Laurent Kessas, Supply Chain BPO, is in charge of the implementation of Ground lion for the Airbus Helicopters Industrial Procurement team at ALTEN, and says, “I would definitely recommend Ground lion for all mature supply chain processes. The speed and quality of the work by LoQutus was impressive, comprising only a few months. I am looking forward to the next version of the software now that we have ironed out the kinks and user feedback is being analysed and incorporated. We also see clear benefits of Ground lion for other companies in the industries we serve.”

Only four workshops of one-day each with the supply team were necessary to map out the supply chain process. “Ground lion understood our needs quickly,

despite a very brief explanation from us, and mapped out a comprehensive system that was adapted to our specific needs during the workshops,” explains Kessas.

Adaptive Case Management (ACM) is ideal for complex supply chains

Previously, ALTEN was using only classic Business Process Management (BPM), which, as Kessas explains, functions well to automate predictable processes but is not specifically designed to address complex supply chains that include unpre-dictable processes and events, particularly where quality control and other organisational flows need to be integrated. Using a BPM-only process and the existing infrastructure drained the resources of the team members, who sometimes spent more time updating different parts of the business on the current system than they did in analysing the situation and creating proactive strategies to address deficiencies.

Today Ground lion provides an overview that enables the engineers to assess the status of a case and flag alerts in real time – for instance, that certain inventory items in a given location are running low, or that a returned item can be replaced by another in a nearby location. In the near future, Ground lion will gain in intelligence and should be able to flag the alerts itself.

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“The Airbus Helicopters supply chain system encompasses a large scope of parts and supplies – from aircraft bodies to electronics – but it also includes information about security, maintenance and repairs,” Kessas adds. “The status of each of the 60.000 items being managed needs to be monitored and analysed in near real time – and that is what Ground lion is helping us to achieve. At the moment, we are importing large data files into Ground lion from SAP every week, but we hope that we will be able to implement a fully automated process soon that will increase the supply chain officer productivity even more.”

The story