Implications for Service Parts Management in the Rapidly Changing Aviation MRO Market

In this paper, we examine how fundamental changes that are taking place in the aviation industry are affecting strategies for managing service parts that are needed to support maintenance and repair operations (MRO). We present observations and recommendations based on the results of an empirical research project initiated by a large European airframe OEM that facilitates the sharing of part consumption data from heavy maintenance checks from different MRO and airline operators. The goal of the information sharing program is to improve the performance of provider systems used to manage parts procurement to support the execution of heavy checks. Our results, which are based on analysis of a sample of these data as well as on several case studies of MRO service providers, indicate that there is the potential to simultaneously reduce service parts inventory investment levels and to improve parts availability by adopting a coordinated, data-driven approach for managing parts throughout the entire MRO service supply chain. The proposed approach is based on new forecasting and decision support concepts that integrate scheduled and unscheduled part consumption and optimize cost-service tradeoffs throughout the extended MRO service supply chain.