In 2019, there's 985 active DHC8 aircraft in the world, with a yearly total component demand of $518,244,375.

That's $526,136.42 of components needed per aircraft per year, or $43,844.70 per month.

How will you reduce your total material costs and the time you spend planning for all this material?

Simplify how you source and process material needs.

Sourcing aircraft material is time-consuming.

Look at your operations daily need for consumables, expendables, rotables, and tooling.

How much time do you spend coordinating these material needs?

The best advice I give our new clients is to get honest with how they source material needs and process orders.

There's a lot of waste within these daily procedures.

A good example is sending RFQs to a list of 300 recipients. Teams then need to review all the information that fills their inbox.

There's an unnecessary waste.

Or how you process material orders.

For some operations, it’s processing purchase orders based on the "cheapest" price.

They then get stuck following up on multiple orders, tracking AWBs from all over the world, spending additional money on shipping, resolving issues, and hundreds of other things.

To achieve the material goals you seek, while reducing your cost and the amount of time you spend, simplify your sourcing, and order processing procedures.

Once you've mastered that or hired help…

Get better material support for your maintenance checks.

Operations have different ways on how they plan, track, and record maintenance checks.

With your c-check, you're coordinating the need for many line items of consumables, expendables, and rotables.

It's unlikely you stock all of this material. 

The difference between these projects and your day-to-day material needs is you have a window to deliver all the material the maintenance project needs, reducing downtime and total project cost.

You'll have a material need for 70 - 150 line items, depending on your aircraft workscope.

A mistake we see most operators making is trying to source and process this material in a constant 30 - 45 day rush, resulting in wasted time and money.

The same is true for d-checks, but now you have the added complexity of rotables needing to be removed and repaired. You'll need to send the components to various MROs who support different capabilities and ATA chapters.

It's time-consuming and stressful.

A more straightforward approach is to streamline these activities.

For your maintenance checks, you can coordinate the delivery for most items in what we call a maintenance check kit.

This delivers all your consumable (including HAZMAT material but in a separate shipment), expendable, and rotable needs in a simplified kit. 

The result is less need to source material from all over the world, process orders to tens if not hundreds of vendors, and the wasteful task of tracking different AWBs.

You can achieve this with your rotable repairs as well.

The maintenance kits are delivered whether you need an outright component, an exchange, or a repair.

It removes a large portion of the common maintenance check supply chain frustrations.

Which leads me to you…

Utilize a nose-to-tail rotable repair program.

You know how it goes.

You have unserviceable components that need repair, but they sit idle in your warehouse.

You search MROs capabilities lists, ask for average repair cost and turn-around-times, process repair orders, ship the spares, review work order quotes, approve the quotes, and follow-up with the shipment.

The tricky part is, you have to do this with many different MROs as they have different capabilities. 

You can't send all your repairs to one MRO who also helps you reduce repair costs and turn-around-times.

Or can you? 

The option is available, but we're often stuck in a cycle of doing things the same way, even if there's a more efficient option available to us.

To simplify your component demand needs, take advantage of a repair partner who can support you beyond the repair of a component.

A partner who can simplify your repair supply chain.

Don't get stuck wasting hours every week chasing material needs, when there are simple things you can start doing today to help you get all the maintenance material you need, without the common supply chain frustrations.