Leading 20,000+ Employees with a Process-Oriented Management System: Insights into Process Management at Lufthansa Technik Group

(a) Situation faced: Structured documentation of an aviation company’s processes is a prerequisite to gaining an authority’s approval for aircraft maintenance, repair, and overhaul. Processes had been documented in a continuously growing number of PDF-based text documents, but the growing complexity of processes meant that this approach to process documentation no longer provided easy-to-understand work instructions for employees that fulfilled the authorities’ requirements. (b) Action taken: Lufthansa Technik Group implemented a process-oriented management system called IQ MOVE, the goal of which is to provide concise, easy-to-read documentation of processes in the form of process maps and swim-lane-based process descriptions. The system is designed to ensure seamless integration of normative and legislative requirements into the processes to avoid cross-references and to separate process documentation into multiple points of view. Moreover, IQ MOVE applies the “Framework for Assignment of Responsibilities” (FAR+) to strengthen process-management roles and increase employees’ acceptance of the system. (c) Results achieved: 20,000+ employees at Lufthansa Technik use IQ MOVE in their daily work. A periodically performed employee survey shows a high level of acceptance by the employees and increased awareness of the process-management roles (e.g., Process Owner, Process Architect, and Process Manager) based on the implementation of FAR+ and the integrated BPM Lifecycle approach. (d) Lessons learned: Key success factors of the system are the easy-to-understand process-modeling notation, the seamless integration of normative and legislative requirements into processes, the clearly defined process-management roles, the holistic process-modeling team, and the comprehensive process operations concept that Lufthansa Technik Group applied.