Estimating win-win potential between supplier and customer a model applied within civil jet engine maintenance

Abstract: Organisations around the world are today looking for new approaches to maintain or develop competitive advantages, reduce costs, free-up capital and improve quality and service. The traditional customer-supplier relation is characterised by the parties focusing on their own cost reduction, creating win-loose scenarios. Companies today are starting to develop their customer-supplier relations towards more relation-focused approaches. The systems approach is a basis for creating win-win relations between the system components. A win-win relation is looked upon in this thesis as the mutual efforts by customer and supplier in finding and reducing the effect of factors that are causing costs and losses for both customer and supplier. The thesis describes a suggested model for estimating win-win potential for supplier and customer in a maintenance contract regarding civil jet engines. The model is defined as consisting of core values, techniques, and tools for estimating win-win potential. The model is applied in supplier and customer scenario. Findings from applying the model indicate that the supplier's maintenance support performance was a parameter affecting loss factors for both supplier and customer. Investigation pointed out the maintenance supplier's organisation, the supplier's maintenance capacity, and the supplier's spare part inventory as the major causes for problems with maintenance support performance.