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Behind the Scenes Aciturri

Created in 1977, Aciturri is a Spanish aeronautics company that maintains sustained growth and has a high capacity for investment and development in the aerospace sector. This video shows how Aciturri successfully integrated continuous improvement and cultural transformation into its industrial operations to drive long-term sustainability and excellence in the aerospace sector.

The challenge of sustainability and cultural change

Aciturri aimed to ensure long-term business sustainability by embedding continuous improvement into its culture. This approach focused on two key pillars, competitiveness and profitability. Key challenges included:

• Employee resistance to change, mainly due to long-standing habits and traditional working methods.
• Cultural alignment, ensuring that continuous improvement became part of everyone’s mindset.
• Breaking down strategic goals, ensuring top-level objectives are translated into actionable team-level targets.
• Cross-functional engagement, extending improvement beyond production to areas such as HR, supply chain, and commercial.
• Leadership development, empowering leaders at all levels to drive and sustain the Lean culture.

The structured approach to continuous improvement

To ensure effective implementation, the continuous improvement model was built around four core pillars:

• Daily Kaizen: Empowered shop-floor teams to solve problems using root cause analysis and structured problem-solving techniques.
• Kaizen Leaders: Enabled the strategic deployment of objectives through structured, high-impact projects led by multidisciplinary teams.
• Kaizen Projects: Delivered transformational initiatives targeting process optimization and cultural change (70+ projects in 2021, 170+ in 2022).
• Support Pillar: Provided essential enablers such as training, internal communication, audits, and governance to sustain the system over time.

Underlying principles that support continuous improvement

The continuous improvement journey at Aciturri is supported by three key principles that define its operational mindset.

Culture

Projects

Strategy

Culture

An environment in which everyone is constantly looking for new ways to add quality, productivity, and value to the organization.

Projects

Short-term improvement projects are designed to achieve breakthrough results on process quality issues.

Strategy

Better decision-making through proactive project risk analysis and the use of real data.

Impact of the transformation

• 5,000+ improvements implemented within a year.
• 42–45 initiatives recognized as success stories for their business impact.
• 170+ strategic projects deployed in 2022 across all departments.
• 17,000+ hours saved through automation and task elimination.
• Strengthened teamwork and a culture of improvement.
• Effective engagement of support functions such as HR, commercial area, engineering, and supply chain.
• Increased autonomy and proactive problem-solving across teams.
• Recognition and celebration of best practices via annual internal awards and communication campaigns.

Aciturri is now expanding the model to the remaining corporate teams, including engineering, finance, IT, and commercial areas. The goal is to establish a unified and standardized improvement system across all current and future business units. The focus for the upcoming years is on enhancing standardization, promoting knowledge sharing, and ensuring that all sites operate under the same continuous improvement culture and governance model.