Case Study: French Ministry of Defense achieves clearer aircraft maintenance scheduling and improved unit performance with Visual Planning

French Ministry of Defense is using Visual Planning

The French Ministry of Defense, responsible for implementing national defense policy, faced rising complexity and unpredictability in its operations and needed better control of personnel and production levels for aircraft maintenance (including Rafale). Until 2011 they relied on whiteboards and Excel across multiple geographically dispersed sites, which made scheduling and resource visibility difficult.

To address this they deployed Visual Planning on their own servers (discovered via the ELOGE project) with an initial rollout of about three months. The tool now schedules maintenance sites by aircraft, staff and equipment, was quickly adopted by users, and delivered clear visibility of site loads and resource availability — yielding substantial performance gains in unit management. They recommend a process-oriented approach before multi-site installation.

French Ministry of Defense

Janik Le Guen

GESTA Project Manager