Its Friday and I cannot wait for the weekend to begin! I leave for Chicago tonight traveling on the megabus should be an experience! It takes around 3 hours to get there (considered a short journey over here). I am really looking forward to seeing the city as I have heard such great things about it. Rachel, another SF intern has been wonderful and offered to accommodate me for the weekend – I couldn’t be luckier!! I am excited to meet up and talk about our different experiences!

Anyways… this week has flown by! I have finally completed my first project and onto my second. This task was in-depth and very complicated as I had to uncover contracts from 2001 onwards. The problem occurs when you realize just how unorganized and ambiguous these contracts were back then. No real foundation for writing these were in place until 2005 so my extensive research was in much need for corporate and regional staff. I was astonished when I was talking to staff from different departments as they did not know the correct contractual agreements we have binding with our operators. This causes huge problems for Rolls-Royce (especially in today’s financial climate) as we are paying out millions of dollars to customers that should never have been reimbursed! It will be very interesting when I get a final total of money paid out that shouldn’t have. I think this will be a real eye-opener for the commercial and aftermarket departments as cost efficiency isn’t their priority. It is interesting to see how the corporate climate is changing within this department as never before have they had to ‘hold back’ on out payments to clients (this is why their reputation for customer service is so high) but now they are being forced to consider the financial impact. This is where my department step in, especially for on-wing care as staff are oblivious to the differentiating contract between on wing care and authorized maintenance centers. This appears to be hard for some aftermarket staff as now they are seeing some unhappy customers like never before. It’s pretty unbelievable to think that such a well established, successful global company their departments aren’t interdependent on each other and no one really knows the impact and effect on others. We are also currently working on a new project to figure out a process to determine when you send on wing care mobile unit and when you tell your operator they must fly to a service center. This will be valuable to the company as currently the RCMs always just send OWC which is significantly costs more when you compare it to a CSC. Anyways I will wrap up before I confuse you more! Have a good weekend all!

Laura J