In Maintenance and Repair Operations, the action lever is to have the shortest lead times possible on the products, with highly variable response times according to the failures.

The rate of arrival of products to be repaired is not manageable. Priority management is often a difficult problem, especially when the work in process on the repair lines is too large as it leads to frequent and ultimately disruptive rescheduling.

Another frequent feature of repair lines is that the same people are involved in the diagnosis phase and then in the repair phase, sometimes with a more or less long interruption due to the supply of components and spare parts between these two phases.

Solutions must then be found to get stakeholders to act on the right stage of the repair process, to keep products moving steadily forward, while also considering the priorities of the moment.

The methods used for this consist of limiting the amount of work in process on the repair line, and implementing a visual management system to help personnel intervene in real time at the right place on the line.

Wipsim has been operating in the repair sector for many years:

• to calculate the number of resources needed on each line, to optimize the number of repair notices to be initiated simultaneously, and to balance the capacity,
• to deploy visual management tools, either in the form of traditional tables or in Factory of the Future mode with the SmartWip digital solution.

Each time, significant gains were obtained in terms of lead times and compliance with delivery commitments.