The bigger picture : optimizing material availability in a contract assembly setting

The product chain Aerospace of Thales Netherlands faced an on-time delivery rate (OTD) of 30-40% in the past few years. After an internal audit, an end-to-end improvement team executed many revision projects of the process, and this increased the OTD towards 80-90%. Despite these positive changes, there is still room for improvement. In order to become more competitive, Thales wants to increase OTD towards its goal of 98%, while reducing customer lead times and costs related to purchasing, holding items and production delay. One approach towards reaching that goal is increasing material availability. This thesis describes several tactical decisions in material management that help to achieve this higher material availability.