CASE STUDY: TransPac Aviation Academy

TransPac is one of the world's largest ab initio flight schools training American and international
cadets, to become commercial airline pilots. Airlines (or individuals) pay to send these young
men and women to TransPac for training. When acquired from its parent company, TransPac
was a struggling, unprofitable subsidiary. By implementing the Kamylon Management System
(KMS) we were able to transform the business to become the industry leader in just three years.

The company faced many challenges, all identified prior to the investment, including:
• Poor information systems and metrics
• Long training duration and variability
• Flight instructor shortage
• Low asset utilization
• Quality issues
• Poor pricing
• High costs

Inclusion of KMS team members early throughout the deal evaluation and diligence processes
mitigated several known risks and set in motion a plan to transform the business post close:

• Reversed decline in flight instructors in approximately ten weeks

• Restructured scheduling and maintenance and improved plane utilization from 15% to
>90% in eighteen months
• Doubled training throughput and revenue in eighteen months
• Achieved record student pass rates while improving quality standards
• Renegotiated pricing with customers while strengthening relationships and growing
revenue threefold over 3 years
• Implemented world-class management and information systems
• Identified key operating metrics and cascaded these metrics and related goals throughout
the entire organization
• Built a fact-based, execution-oriented management system and performance culture

Kamylon’s talent management capability was also crucial: recruiting, evaluating and
incentivizing instructors, senior managers, and middle management. Other KMS tools applied
include: value-stream analysis, constraint (bottleneck) analysis, statistical analysis of quality
drivers, kaizen events, 360 evaluations, goal deployment, 5S and visual workplace, root cause
problem solving, among others. Perhaps most noteworthy is how these continuous improvement
practices were systematically modeled, understood, embraced, and utilized daily by the TransPac
team from top to bottom, transforming TransPac into one of the largest and best run flight
schools in the world.

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