SAP Solution Brief
SAP for Aerospace & Defense: Airline Maintenance
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.
and Operations Managers
ASSURING THE SHORTEST
POSSIBLE AIRCRAFT
MAINTENANCE
TURNAROUND TIME
Enable the Prediction and Forecasting of 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 mainte-
nance and engineering (M&E) services possible, with the dual
purpose of reducing MRO and M&E costs while keeping down-
time 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 aircraft’s 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 simul-
taneously 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 main-
tenance 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 don’t 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 fore-
cast 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 airline’s 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 lion’s share of the total mainte-
nance expense.
Excess inventory capacity – The airline industry, as a whole,
sits on billions of dollars of excess capacity in parts. Excess inven-
tory and materials costs significantly increase the annual mainte-
nance 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
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 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
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.
 www.sap.com/contactsap

Better decisions – When you have global visibility and real-

time, 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 represen-
tative or visit us today on the Web at www.sap.com/industries.

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