Vendor assessment and procurement decision making through data mining in aviation industry

Aviation industry is a mix of intricate engineering processes, elaborated procurement procedures and complex management decision making strategies. Information in form of data needs to be stored for variety of raw materials along with numerous production operation and processes for the entire life cycle of each aircraft. Its nature may be in form of aircraft materials requirement, manufacturing processes, testing results and performance evaluation history. Procurement managers are faced with regular decision making situations prior to approaching vendors for material specifications, costs, transportation modes as well as change requirement by designer. Therefore, they need to maintain a regularly updated database management system for procurement research and actual transactions. The database may also include information about time change items during the service life of aircraft. They also need to forecast demands based on historical knowledge through mining data from these databases. A number of standard and customized software applications for data storing and retrieval are already in use in aviation industry. However the literature for mining this data for decision making and analysis for various requirements of aviation industry is very limited. This research is focused on mining relevant data from such data bases and utilizing it for decision making process. A case study of typical aircraft industry was selected for extraction of data. A variety of statistical tools have been applied on extracted data for decision making for procurement and demand forecasting.