SAP Solution Brief SAP for Aerospace & Defense: Airline Maintenance and Operations Managers

ASSURING THE SHORTEST POSSIBLE AIRCRAFT MAINTENANCE TURNAROUND TIME

Enable the Prediction and Forecasting of Demand for Parts and Services

Throughout the airline industry, maintenance and operations managers are not able to achieve the fastest possible aircraft turnaround times due to the challenges they face in being able to accurately predict and forecast the demand for parts and services. SAP solutions designed specifically for airline maintenance and operations managers enable collaboration, global visibility, and proactive resource monitoring that help managers reduce aircraft maintenance and engineering turnaround times and minimize delays by accurately planning and predicting the demand for parts and services.

Improving Your Vision

As the maintenance or operations manager of your company, you are charged with the responsibility of delivering the most efficient maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) and maintenance and engineering (M&E) services possible, with the dual purpose of reducing MRO and M&E costs while keeping downtime to a minimum. This responsibility exists with every aircraft you service, starting from day one acceptance of the aircraft and its maintenance schedule from an OEM and continuing throughout that aircrafts operational and maintenance life cycle. As daunting as this may seem, the challenge is amplified by the persistent, industry-wide pressure to introduce new efficiencies to further reduce maintenance and engineering costs while simultaneously increasing and maximizing operational availability of the fleet. The pressure is justified, because any aircraft delayed in maintenance is missing revenue-generating opportunities and increasing overall maintenance costs. Time is money, and maintenance organizations that can harness their experience and provide mission-critical maintenance support services in the most robust manner will gain competitive advantages and reduce overall turnaround times.

To achieve this goal repeatedly, you must be able to predict and forecast demand accurately. Many maintenance operations today, however, lack the global visibility and monitoring of the maintenance schedule needed to prevent surprises that cause delays in work scope and maintenance due to unavailability of parts, work space, and personnel with appropriate skills. And when you dont know availability, you cannot optimize your work schedules. MRO operations are often outsourced, but you may not have supply chain visibility into subcontracted operations, rotable parts pools, and other critical supply information. Without this supply chain visibility, it is difficult to know when parts will be received, causing delays in the maintenance schedule and requiring manual follow-up. In addition, wrong-part and wrong-time deliveries can result in further delays. This lack of vision contributes to the buildup in spare parts, which dominates the airline industry not only with just-in-time parts, but also with millions of just-in-case parts on hand. Although the parts are there, the warehouse and suppliers often do not have access to the maintenance schedule, and this can lead to delivery delays. In addition, without adequate supply chain visibility, incorrect repair-or-replace decisions made during the strip-and-inspect process can drive up maintenance costs. The inability of MRO operations to accurately predict and forecast the demand for parts and services is unnecessarily inhibiting maintenance turnaround time and increasing aircraft downtime. Solutions from SAP replace this inability with global visibility of parts and resources, leading to an enhanced ability to manage parts along the supply chain network. To enable you to reduce turnaround times and delays, they improve your vision by giving you the collaborative scheduling and capacity planning tools, optimized and integrated functions, and proactive monitoring you need to accurately and dependably predict and forecast demand for parts and services.

Taking Control

The value of improving your ability to predict and forecast demand for parts and resources is best seen in the value lost by not doing so. This lost value for maintenance companies is being manifested in the following forms throughout the airline industry: Delays and lost revenue opportunities When a grounded plane can cost tens of thousands of dollars a day in lost revenue that cannot be regained, the concern over the impact of MRO and M&E expense on the corporate bottom line becomes obvious. And the impact is multiplied by the number of aircraft needing maintenance at any given time out of the thousands of aircraft in service today. Compounding this lost revenue, as well as your challenge of providing the fastest possible maintenance service at the lowest possible cost, is the average age of an airlines fleet. Decades-old aircraft are common. Newer aircraft, with their better corrosion protection and stronger airframes, have a current and long-term maintenance cost advantage over older aircraft. Together, however, maintenance operations on old and new aircraft today account for labor costs that consume the lions share of the total maintenance expense. Excess inventory capacity The airline industry, as a whole, sits on billions of dollars of excess capacity in parts. Excess inventory and materials costs significantly increase the annual maintenance budgets of most airline companies today. Maintenance budget overruns Adding to the strain of excess inventory are maintenance budget overruns that, due to poor visibility into availability, can happen any time. These overruns can take the form of overtime for emergency repairs, airfreight for materials or spare parts, or loss of spare parts due to faulty operations.

For your maintenance company to take control and end these manifestations of poor vision, you need integrated maintenance operations across the entire MRO value chain. You require collaboration capabilities in inventory management and with suppliers and third-party providers. And you need to provide the necessary analytics and connectivity tools to enable real-time, proactive monitoring and decision making for parts and resources up and down the value chain. Only a proven and complete solution one with worldwide implementations, a long track record, and extensive customer references can deliver truly integrated maintenance operations to your company. And SAP delivers such a solution.
Closing the Turnaround Gap

With global visibility and proactive monitoring of component movements and resource availability across the supply chain network, your decision-making capabilities are significantly increased and the decisions you make are improved proportionally. Unify your landscape The SAP NetWeaver platform powers SAP solutions. SAP NetWeaver is a single, integrated platform that helps you reduce the cost of change by making multiple platforms behave as one. With powerful data transfer and data warehousing functionality, SAP NetWeaver helps airline MRO companies to track inventory and maintenance requirements in real time, providing a robust foundation for predictive maintenance initiatives. And by unifying your technology into one platform, SAP NetWeaver also lowers your total cost of ownership.
The Benefits of Clear Business Vision

Solutions for airline management from SAP directly target the core processes that drive your maintenance operations. These solutions help you achieve the following: Let your suppliers in SAP solutions enable collaborative replenishment to streamline inventory management. Enhanced collaboration with suppliers and subcontractors through collaborative scheduling and capacity planning is what it takes to minimize delays, assure on-time deliveries, take hold of inventory availability, and reduce overall turnaround time. Optimize your processes SAP software supports your most critical business processes and provides tools to manage these processes for greater efficiency and effectiveness. By linking collaborative planning and forecasting into execution, SAP solutions help you to optimize your maintenance and supply chain processes, including sales and marketing, maintenance engineering, advanced planning, maintenance operations, and parts and tools management processes. Operate in real time With SAP solutions, you can move from reactive to predictive maintenance. These solutions support event-driven maintenance that uses real-time monitoring systems to help predict maintenance issues before they occur.

With solutions from SAP, the integration of planning and analytics processes with your core maintenance and supply chain processes makes the accurate prediction and forecasting of parts and resources demand possible avoiding delays, speeding turnaround, and decreasing downtime. With these solutions, you can achieve the following benefits: Improved collaboration When you equip your suppliers and subcontractors with collaborative scheduling and capacity planning tools, you improve task and job planning, reduce waiting time, improve consumables inventory, and lower inventory purchasing costs. Optimized processes When you link collaborative planning and forecasting into execution, you optimize your maintenance and supply chain processes, resulting in improved productivity, fewer stock write-offs, enhanced alerts, improved error detection, and faster problem resolution.

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Better decisions When you have global visibility and realtime, proactive monitoring across the MRO value chain, your decisions become more precise, timely, and effective, leading to optimized repairables inventory and faster aircraft turnaround times.
Turn It Around with SAP Solutions

To learn more about how SAP solutions can help you reduce turnaround times and increase uptimes, call your SAP representative or visit us today on the Web at www.sap.com/industries.
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