Addressing Complexity

Addressing Complexity


    Hello, and welcome back to my blog. This week I am going to discuss complexity and how I have seen it addressed in my work place. 
    
    From the reading in this weeks lesson, complexity can be addressed in multiple ways. I am going to describe how it is addresses where I work. 

    First of all, I work for a major aircraft company as I have stated before and some of the information I would like to get into detail about is proprietary and there for I will speak in general industry standard terms. 

    One of the most complex thing we do is to develop a heavy maintenance cost and schedule to present for proposal to our customers. This has a great many constraints, objectives, and time limits presented by the formal customer request for cost and schedule response. 

    Once we receive this request, we immediately begin looking at the objectives or requirements of the maintenance activity. Each line item is addressed individually since all of our heavy maintenance inputs are different but may have some similar work to previous visits. We have operations and our Industrial Engineering teams go line by line comparing what we have previously done compared to what is being asked to do. When they are done the have a list of what man hours it will take to do each line item with a total count of man hours for the entire effort. 

    This data is taken to our estimating team and they factor in our ramp rate and other variable such as support hours, materials, and management reserve to come up with an overall cost estimate for the visit. 

    The schedule portion is done by taking the operational head count and performing simulations with the number of heads we can support with.  These simulations tell us if we can meet the customer timeline or if we need to hire more mechanics to meet the deadline if that is possible. In rare occasions we cannot meet the deadline due to constraints within the project where head count cannot be increased to increase production and then we have to negotiate with the customer on the time line. 

    
Recommended References 

Khirsty, C. J., Mohammadi, J., & Amekudzi, A. A. (2012). Systems engineering with economics, probability, and statistics. Fort Lauderdale: J. Ross.


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