Visual Support for Complex Repair Operations in a Global Aerospace Company

Project managers are often faced with operational processes that are complex and difficult to monitor (Bititci et al. 2012). Project teams can be geographically distributed, have contextual differences between projects and such teams may face issues that are temporal in nature (Bendoly 2014; Shi et al. 2014b). Monitoring the progression of active projects, and specifically how projects evolve over their workflow, can be of vital importance. Further, understanding whether a project is following the best possible projected pathway, and being able to identify possible delays in the project early on, empowers operations teams to take actions and evaluate impacts. Such understanding is becoming increasingly relevant where Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are in place. In SLA settings in particular, shifts in performance can alert a project manager to a potential threat to operational plans. Conversely, a lack of such awareness can result in embedded errors and project cost and/or time overruns (Hicks 2013). Assessing project performance can be challenging, as a number of factors affect the evaluation of the performance indicators and overall output of the project (Carey et al. 2013; Xie et al. 2011).