3 Easy Ways to Reduce Your Aircraft Brake Costs
Do you purchase aircraft brakes? Of course, you do.
Whether you purchase, exchange, or repair brakes, a lot of time and money is spent managing this critical component.
The total MRO demand for aircraft wheel and brakes in 2019 is $2,500,000,000.
How much you spend is in there somewhere.
After working with thousands of operators, aircraft MROs and defense clients, we’ve seen and experienced, how you process your aircraft brake orders and manage the asset life cycle will determine how much of a drain it puts on your operations capital.
If you don’t care about your operations capital (which you should), you still spend hours of your own time managing the purchasing and repair process.
Here are a few ways to streamline your aircraft brake supply chain.
Take advantage of flat rate exchanges.
The first question you should answer when planning an aircraft brake purchase is, why buy this outright?
If you have a brake needing repair, and you know to some degree of certainty it’s not BER, an exchange is your first choice.
If a brake is $10,000 outright, the average overhaul is $7,000, and the exchange cost is $1,000, you just saved $2,000.
20%!
The best option is to roll this all up into a flat rate repair program. This lowers your cost and gives you predictability in your material costs.
Repairs costs are unpredictable.
Focus on decreasing your repair cycle time.
Depending on the size of your operation, you’ll want to put some attention on your aircraft brake repair cycle times, especially if you’re not involved with a brake support program.
Why does cycle time matter?
With lower cycle times, it alleviates the pressure of keeping safety stock and avoiding AOGs.
As your repair cycle time increases, you’ll need to keep more aircraft brakes in inventory.
Inventory is important, but it’s costly. Optimizing it is essential.
Speak to your trusted aircraft material partner on some of the ways you can reduce your repair cycle times.
Here’s a few to start:
Store your unserviceable brakes at your MRO partners facility to reduce the transit times of your repair process.
Use a flat rate exchange to remove the shipping time of your unserviceable units.
Determine your required spare provisioning list (RSPL) models and work backward from there. This will help you identify your need and room for inventory improvement.
Work with a trusted material partner who has a track record. Order delays can add days or weeks to your order processing time.
Remove unnecessary steps in your order approval process.
There are many more ideas to explore depending on your operation, region, and material strategy.
Reap the rewards of outsourcing your aircraft brake requirements.
Some operations are big enough to keep their brake repairs in house, others’ aren’t.
Just consider all the time and money you spend managing inventory.
Operating costs of inventory will include financing and warehousing. This number usually runs around 1.1% of inventory value per month.
If you have a single aircraft with an inventory value of $500,000, it will cost you $66,000 per year in inventory costs.
On the component level, if you have a single brake that costs $10,000, you’ll be spending roughly $1,320 per year to keep it in inventory.
Now multiply that by how many brakes you keep in inventory, and you’ll get a better picture of the financial burden it can have on your operation.
A fix to this is to outsource as much of the inventory and repair process as you can.
Those are a few ways to streamline your aircraft brake supply chain and to take some of the time and money burden of you and your operation.
Explore your options with your trusted material partner and make the best decision for your organization.