High-Quality Project Management - Contractual Services for a Dynamic Business Environment

While the air and ground transportation industries in North America have basically recovered from the economic turbulence of the global pandemic, they are now facing new business conditions that demand dynamic responses to fluctuating demand, manufacturing and assembly capacities.

As a key supplier of specialized expertise and talent to major transportation manufacturers, AAA Canada is responding to these market conditions with an ongoing diversification of service offers supported by its resource base - the AAA Canada professional workforce of technical and process specialists.

AAA Canada is an established leader in the provision of technical and operational support services for transportation manufacturers (buses, trains, planes, trucks, etc.). Its reputation has been built on trust, expertise, and a focus on excellent customer service. The company offers a comprehensive suite of solutions ranging from maintenance and repair expertise to logistics and supply chain management. Each service offer is tailored to meet the specific needs of each specific client.

Change is constant - innovation is necessary

For the transportation manufacturing industry, the combination of economic turbulence, supply chain disruptions and labour-and-material shortages are constantly changing conditions that generate fluctuating levels of demand. These fluctuations impact all operational processes such as raw material suppliers, production scope and scheduling, sub-contracting for assembled parts, labour demands and so on.

Confronted with these new dynamic market conditions, major manufacturers (like Boeing and Airbus) have begun to design new manufacturing processes which involve changes to materials, fabrication and assembly processes for all sorts of ground transportation vehicles. These waves of change then often lead to new process requirements and designs, and thus regular changes to primary fabrication and assembly processes.

Today's operating environment involves major changes

Changes such as:

• The introduction of new types of materials;
• Adapting to new sources of energy (primarily electricity);
• And recruiting from a tight labour market for skilled and experienced technical and operational assembly and sub-assembly resources.

In this context, it's clear that experimentation and innovation in the ways planes, trains, and buses, etc., are fabricated is necessary to meet the challenges posed by these new conditions. As a response, manufacturers are now seeking strategic ways to externalize key parts of fabrication and assembly processes and increasingly manage these externalizations as projects using core project-management best practices.

This relocation of key elements of fabrication and assembly processes increases the flexibility available to the manufacturers facing fluctuating demand.

In terms of management attention, the relocation of work means offloading to the contractor key concerns such as project schedules and deadlines, risk management measures and quality control guarantees to experienced specialists, such as those provided by AAA Canada. This is increasingly a critical value-add offer for the transportation manufacturing industry.

Flexibility and efficiency are priorities

The AAA business model is based on finding, hiring and deploying specific experience and talent and then configuring these capabilities in ways that offer customized packages to access necessary skills, flexibility and quality guarantees to its current and potential clients.

As the transportation manufacturing industry sector experiences faces the complex environment described earlier, manufacturers are seeking to increase flexibility (in order to respond to fluctuating levels of demand and new orders), manage various types of risk more effectively and have more opportunities to control and manage production and labour costs. 

More specifically, as the levels of new orders and current fulfilment of existing orders fluctuate more than ever, a greater range of the industry's manufacturing operations now take shape in the form of projects. The same phenomenon is occurring in many, if not most, sectors of manufacturing, which has led to an important ongoing growth in the need for easily-deployable high-quality project management services. Project management has thus become a critical element of manufacturing 'best practices' and is used to improve overall flexibility, risk management, quality control and management of project costs.

By externalizing key elements of fabrication and assembly, manufacturers are able to create precise specifications for their requirements and then look for specialized project management specialists like AAA to fulfill their requirements with respect to quality, risk and costs. AAA is able to review clients' requirements and seek available internal resources that can be combined into a customized service offer.

Flexible packages of project management services

In the context, it has become evident that the increased need for capable and effective project management is a good and obvious fit with AAA's business model. The model offers flexible and guaranteed access to specific combinations of talent, experience available in flexible contracts defined to meet a client's need for support with current and future fabrication or assembly operations. AAA Canada is responding to this emerging need by offering current and potential clients customized packages of project management expertise packaged in ways that make it flexible and cost-efficient for the client while also offering significant risk mitigation and quality guarantees.

With respect to project management requirements experienced by its industry sectors, it is a core strength of AAA's business model that it is able to reach into its pool of senior certified employees to offer clients customized-to-client-requirements project management services.

Thus, AAA can offer its clients in the transportation fabrication industry innovative ways of adapting to a dynamic market through customized contracts that provide:

1. Specialization in finding and hiring experienced candidates with both project management capabilities and technical skills and experience focused on transportation fabrication and assembly;
2. Package the availability and performance specifications of these project-management specialists in ways that fit closely with any given client's specific requirements;
3. A proven and demonstrated ability to maintain constant close contact with its clients to provide the most effective technical capabilities in support of optimal manufacturing and assembly processes.

In support of the company's continued push to diversify its offering based on talented and experienced specialists, the AAA Academy is an important asset in developing, certifying and maintaining professional competence that supports AAA's ability to package professional project management.

Conclusion

By offering new and innovative ways of packaging skills, talent and experience to specific client requirements, AAA Canada is demonstrating its ability to adapt to constant change in ways that add value and support the continuous improvement of the air and ground transportation industry's manufacturing, fabrication and assembly operations.

For more information about flexible packages of project management service and skilled contractual arrangements to plug gaps in operational requirements, contact Alain Fortin or Jacky Jerpan at AAA Canada.