Sammendrag
Operating in a highly competitive and regulated industry, aviation Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO) providers are constantly seeking ways to optimize regulatory compliance activities and business processes. For that reason, Lean and Business Process Management (BPM) practices are increasingly being applied within this sector. The problem with both the BPM and Lean techniques used today in the MRO environment is that they don’t represent all the critical aspects of the complex product-centric service industry. Thus, there is a need for a new approach that can provide a more comprehensive visualization of the MRO processes by considering all the flows that affect their operational efficiency in one diagram. To address this problem, the present thesis is based on an action research study performed at Aero Norway AS where a proposed approach, specifically meant for the MRO sector, was developed, tested, and evaluated. The results showed that, compared to other modelling techniques, the model proposed has the ability to represent the complexity of the MRO business processes in a more complete and realistic manner, considering not only the movement of the physical engine but also its required information which is usually neglected by other models.