My shop is maxed out with planes and no hangar space.

The reason, no parts? They have planes that can’t be finished because there are no parts?

That's a very common problem, funny thing is the shops think they are busy! "We are packed with airplanes!" You aren't busy, it just takes you twice as long to do the same number of jobs!

Spoken like a person that has never had to deal with the supply chain problem from the shops perspective.

If I was to wait until all the (known) parts / documentation needed to finish an airplane had arrived, there would be down time for the workers, so we need to start new things hoping to heck that we get them in and out without finding one that needs additional work (parts that can be slow) or parts for another project showing up; then a 'shuffle' needs to occur to get one back in the parts have arrived for.

Every time we shift gears to work another section without closing the discrepancy on the previous section, there is time involved, be it in the shuffle of aircraft, or renewing the though process.

That is not billable, and it happens way too much lately.

Example: Seemingly simple job, have a stub spar in the tail of a Baron that was loose on the bulkhead. No published fix, so go to the RDO for a hardware change to oversize. Done it before, generally not a big deal (but the approval for this is on a serial-specific repair). Daily updates for the last few days have been 'Internal IT problem'. Meanwhile, now I have a Baron that cannot be shuffled around; fortunately, it is in the back corner of the shop, but while we wait for that documentation, there she sits using up real estate.

Spoken like a person that has never had to deal with the supply chain problem from the shops perspective.

If I was to wait until all the (known) parts / documentation needed to finish an airplane had arrived, there would be down time for the workers, so we need to start new things hoping to heck that we get them in and out without finding one that needs additional work (parts that can be slow) or parts for another project showing up; then a 'shuffle' needs to occur to get one back in the parts have arrived for.

Every time we shift gears to work another section without closing the discrepancy on the previous section, there is time involved, be it in the shuffle of aircraft, or renewing the though process.

That is not billable, and it happens way too much lately.

Example: Seemingly simple job, have a stub spar in the tail of a Baron that was loose on the bulkhead. No published fix, so go to the RDO for a hardware change to oversize. Done it before, generally not a big deal (but the approval for this is on a serial-specific repair). Daily updates for the last few days have been 'Internal IT problem'. Meanwhile, now I have a Baron that cannot be shuffled around; fortunately, it is in the back corner of the shop, but while we wait for that documentation, there she sits using up real estate.