Part 3: Aerospace Machine Shop Customer Service Process Improvement
This is the third and last post in this series on the bottlenecks I keep finding at aerospace and defense machine shops. Part one was planning, part two was quoting — both worth real money, both things you’d expect a lean guy to go after. This one’s different. It’s about an aerospace machine shop customer service process, and it starts with a number that still gets me: $232,700 a year, found in a department nobody had ever actually realized.
Same client as the last two posts. Different corner of the business — the customer service reps who take the order, answer the “where’s my part” calls, and manage every date change a customer asks for. Call it what it is: this is the front office. None of it happens on a machine. All of it decides whether the shop floor gets accurate, timely information to actually work from.
Here’s what we walked into. No standard way of doing the job — whoever trained a new rep just sat them at a cubicle and showed them how they personally did it, which means the training was only ever as good as that one person’s habits. No KPIs, which meant nobody could say how much work was actually coming in, how long it should take, or whether the team was completing all the work that was coming in each day. That’s how you end up with regular overtime in a department of six or seven people and nobody able to explain why. Work wasn’t even formally assigned across teams — it got picked up informally, whoever had time. And the company is growing fast: booking volume climbed from roughly 380 orders a week to 530 over the year we looked at, averaging 446 a week.
We mapped the whole thing on the wall, timed people doing their actual jobs, and logged 28 distinct pain points across the team. The backlog told the real story: at any given moment, one rep might be sitting on 17 open line items while another was carrying more than 100 — over 1,400 line items in the queue departmentwide. Every one of those is either a customer waiting for an answer or an order sitting in the queue to be entered, and both mean the same thing: unnecessary delay stacked onto the sales cycle, pushing earnings out further than they need to be.
Three specific processes ate most of the day, and we rebuilt all three:
Status updates.
- Before: Entirely reactive — a rep only checked a job’s status when a customer called asking, then chased production by email for an answer. Close to 40% of the team’s workload was just this.
- After: An automated report goes out to customers on a schedule, plus a proactive weekly check so reps already have the answer before anyone asks. Cycle time per request dropped from 5 minutes to under a minute — an 85% cut — and delays fell 36%.
Order entry.
- Before: Any deviation in quantity, price, or lead time — even a minor one — triggered a mandatory handoff to an estimator, on top of a separate handoff to planners and a slow hunt through the item master.
- After: Wider guardrails let reps resolve minor deviations themselves, plus better use of an existing lookup tool to cut search time. Cycle time went from 8.15 minutes to 6.42 minutes, a 21% improvement — and the team expects handoffs to drop by half more once the new guardrails fully take hold.
Production date changes.
- Before: Every change ran through unstructured, handwritten emails back and forth with production — no template, no single source of truth.
- After: One master list where reps log requests and production updates directly, a real email template, and a daily standup plus weekly meeting between production and customer service instead of email tag. Cycle time fell from 4.35 minutes to 2.25 minutes — a 48% improvement — and delays dropped 71%.
Add it up and you get roughly 9,300 hours a year given back to a team that was never going to get bigger just because the order book did. The dollar total across all three fixes: $232,000+ annually. And just like the last two posts, this wasn’t about cutting headcount — the goal from day one was absorbing growth without adding it.
The part I’d actually flag as the bigger win, long term: this team now has real KPIs — quality, cost, delivery, inventory, tracked daily — and a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) document that says, for the first time, who’s actually responsible, accountable, consulted or informed for what. Because here’s the thing about a department with no metrics: it’s not that the work isn’t getting done, it’s that nobody can tell you whether it’s getting done well, or where the next problem is going to show up.
If you run a machine shop, here’s what I’d check in your own front office:
- Do you actually know your order volume trend, or are you just reacting week to week?
- Can you say, right now, how much of your team’s day goes to “where’s my order” instead of moving the order forward?
- Does every process in that department have one person actually accountable for it — or does work just get picked up informally when someone has time?
Three posts down and one pattern holds across all of them so far: planning, quoting, customer service — none of it is the machine, and all of it sets up the shop floor for accuracy and readiness of order production (Part 4). Add it up and the process improvement pattern turns into a cost savings number: roughly $1 million a year out of planning, another $200,000 out of quoting, and $232,700 out of customer service — north of $1.4 million a year in documented savings from this one client, across three departments that never touch a machine. If any of this sounds like your shop, that’s exactly the kind of work TBM does.
Next and final post coming soon: How an Aerospace Machine Shop Cut Its Lead Time 46% Before a Single Chip Got Cut
