Aircraft maintenance is stressful. But who am I kidding, you know this, right?
It's where you spend a large chunk of your operating budget, and where 95% of your stress occurs.
Or maybe not.
It's very possible that you never have issues, you never go over budget, and stress is not in your dictionary.
But then again, you live on planet earth, and that's highly unlikely.
Inefficiencies will always occur, stress will have its time of dominance, and money will continue being a touchy subject.
Is that always necessary for aircraft component repairs?
In a world of not-enough-time and must-have-nows, your goal is to always focus on core activities. Such as high-level aircraft maintenance projects and making money in the air.
Component repairs are daunting but worry not.
I have a solution for you.
Delegate and outsource
In a recent survey, it's touted that 65% of all major airlines outsource, which results in 35% - 45% in airframe savings.
Outsourcing and delegating aren't evil practices.
It's not because you're lazy or trying to offload your responsibilities.
In fact, the opposite is true.
Outsourcing creates more value for you.
No matter how you think of it, getting help leaves you more time to focus on core activities.
Here's an article we wrote on how to delegate.
When you outsource your aircraft component repairs, time is no longer wasted and cost expenditure is driven down.
Creating more value for your repairs
Outsourcing, directly and indirectly, increases your strategic value.
The direct cost benefits are savings on repair labor, reduced freight costs, reduced repair costs, and reduced inventory expenditure. And that's just to name a few.
The indirect costs are less internal labor costs, reduced administrative expenditure, better privatization of opportunity costs and the list goes on and on.
BUT!
And I mean a big but, this cannot be achieved sending to hundreds of MROs spanning all ATA chapters.
That's not efficient and results in more out of control issues and bottlenecks.
The proper repair strategy is to outsource through a repair management program.
There are countless benefits of adopting such a strategy:
- Economies of scale: bigger isn't always better but in this case it is. By tapping into a Repair Management program you not only leverage your repairs, you leverage hundreds of airlines' repairs. We call this power in numbers.
- Less money spent on shipping: instead of shipping to 20+ MROs, think how much money you’d save shipping to just one. One consolidated shipment instead of 20 express shipments. Cha-ching. I hear you saving thousands.
- More time spent on core activities less processing: instead of dealing with time-consuming repair processes, you can focus your time on other more important things, and leave the dirty work to your strategic partner. No messy paperwork, approvals, or AWBs. Just one RO of 10, 20, 30 parts. Simple as that.
- Drive costs down through piece parting: I bet you don’t spend much of your time piece parting your repairs. Having a strategic partner who has supporting expendables in stock is crucial. I’ve seen an MRO quote a $250 bolt for $1,500. It crazy out there people.
- Better communication: Let’s keep this simple. Is it easier to talk with 30 people or just 1? Or here's another example. Was it easier for you to deal with 10 girlfriends in high school or just 1? Exactly, 1 is much easier. Streamlining your communication will keep things moving more efficiently and it’ll put less stress on you.
Overspending is a problem, and so is lost productivity.
By streamlining your repair strategy you'll not only save more money, you'll save more time.
P.S. Do you have repair needs? Let's discuss how our Repair Management program can create more value for your operation. Simply, click here.
