Marianne Bakker: Silent Stores Fighter

A&P mechanics, engineers, and technicians do excellent work, but there is another group of people doing great work who are sometimes forgotten because they are not in the front line of maintenance. Many of them provide the logistics support. They control the stream of rotables (LRUs or line replaceable units) to and from the aircraft. Their work would be easy if they had just one or two LRUs to manage. At some bigger airlines they have thousands of LRUs traveling between the aircraft and the shop. To make it more complicated, there is more than one aircraft and more then one shop. To make it even more complicated, some aircraft and some shops are located on another continent. At the end, to make it even more complicated, some LRUs travel from stores to the aircraft and from stores to the shops. Some of those stores can also be located at another continent. It is absolutely necessary to have a special breed of people to do that job. One of the greatest in that skill is Marianne Bakker.

Marianne is an inventory planner and controller presently working at Dutch airline KLM. She started her career in a repair shop as a planner and troubleshooter. After some time she was asked for a job at the kit-planning department in the mid-1980s. At that time she was involved in a lot of projects (personal video, TCAS, satcom, cabin reconfiguration, etc.). The engineers at that time were always asking the manager of the kit-planning department to get Bakker on their project because they knew that she would take care that all necessary parts showed up on time. If Bakker is taking care of materials, the engineers would not have to be bothered with logistics questions and could concentrate on their work. She also contributed by teaching the young engineers how the material management processes work. Those young engineers became better engineers because Marianne instructed them.

Getting all the parts for a modification on time is a huge challenge. And Bakker is a fighter. She was always able to get parts and ensure that aircraft never ever had a delay because of lack of parts.

Bakker transferred from the kit-planning department to inventory planning and control in the mid-1990s. That was a new challenge and a new opportunity to show her qualities. One of the trickiest jobs is to support outsourced C- and D-checks. Usually the aircraft are sent to an MRO in another country or on another continent. Bakker plays a key role in all LRU transactions. Some of the parts are removed for regular maintenance, some for modifications, and some for repair. The LRUs should be returned by the day (or before) the aircraft is powered up. Bakker elevated that job to a high art. She takes care that hundreds of agreements are made to get LRUs repaired or modified. The LRUs are tracked all the time to be able to anticipate any glitches in the process. At the end, when everybody thinks that the LRU issue for that particular check is under control, there is always the ground engineer who calls Bakker announcing that at the final test one of the no-go LRUs failed and that there is no spare. At that moment Bakker� kicks in with a new plan to get the LRU from some place in her big network. She prevents the airline from enduring expensive ground time and makes possible that one more check finishes on time.

Bakker and her efforts are not clearly visible in the long chain of small processes that make aircraft maintenance possible. Project managers, mechanics, engineers, flight ops, pilots, and many more people of the front line are recognized and honored for their good work but they all are dependent on timely delivery of materials. Bakker usually silently and accurately controls the material streams. All glitches in deliveries are discovered and corrected on a timely basis, and the hard work is not visible to outsiders. She has never let people on a C- or D-check down. Behind every LRU removal and installation is a logistics process. The process is in total control of Bakker. Because the LRUs are always arriving on time, nobody thinks about Marianne’s great contribution to make maintenance an ultimate success. Thank you Marianne Bakker for a great performance. – By Marijan Jozic