Business Analytics for the Airlines MRO Industry

Business Analytics for the Airlines MRO Industry

1. Introduction

Despite the challenges Airlines have been facing, potential for opportunity in the Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) industry is promising. It is estimated that the world fleet will grow by 60% over the next 10 years and the MRO global market will grow by US$4.8 billion over the next 5 years. Solid growth in new airlines, aircraft fleet and passenger numbers, both in developed and emerging economies (particularly china and India), is adding to the demand for the MRO services. The newly introduced wide-body aircraft Airbus A380, which is certain to introduce new standards, processes and tools, can only add to the complexities of MRO and the operational information to optimize the maintenance processes and labor costs. Geographic spread of (new facilities in Asia Pacific) MRO facilities, poses new challenges ofintegrating data, customers, suppliers and IT systems for operational information needs.

2. MRO Systems Complexities

With a mix bag of IT systems and their proliferation, the Airline companies or the MRO outsourcers are not geared to integrate the operational data and add value to it by transforming it into business information, both for process operation analysis as well as parts inventory optimization. Airlines of 100+ aircrafts can typically hold inventory of 200+ thousand parts in the store. This, includes, high priced items like engines, Landing gears, APUs and other major equipment. Most of these parts have large life spans resulting in very high maintenance cost compared to initial purchase cost. Last but not least, planned men and material (Parts and Tool) at the time of maintenance execution also will help to reduce maintenance cost.

3. The Traditional approach

Most of the leading MRO Software provide standard reports/queries. None of them help the Maintenance and Engineering (M&E) section to identify potential areas for better service or saving cost. This results in huge additional effort in generating ad-hoc reports, queries and data extraction to spread sheets. Mainframe based MRO software generate reports (standard as well as Ad-hoc) through batches. The end user has to wait 10 to 12 hours to receive the report and act on it.

4. Taking a Different Approach

The modern approach supported by BI&A tools enables M&E to build information entities for decision support, extract, cleanse and load data, build Data Warehouse and drill down the data to get desired maintenance information. Building the Data Warehouse is a one time effort and the end user can generate the reports the way they want using the tools. The major advantages of this BI&A system are:

Desired Data is readily available
Generates queries/reports on any permutation and combination
High data visibility
Helps to take quick decision by Engineering management based on recent data
Reduces IT cost
It is a paper less process

The above translates into achieving the key MRO objectives of enhanced airworthiness, high reliability, cost-effective maintenance, preventive maintenance planning and on-time flying.


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