As maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) continues to make great strides along the path to digitalisation, we sat down in Hong Kong with HAECO’s chief commercial officer Gerald Steinhoff to talk about HAECO’s progress, as well as several thought-provoking new initiatives changing the way that the company works.
Bringing together numerous projects under the aegis of its ‘One HAECO’ programme, the MRO outfit has driven significant changes, Steinhoff tells us. “I think the buying behaviour of airlines has changed as well — it’s quite interesting. In former times we saw more shopping: ‘do you have a slot here in three months?’ Now they call us [to inquire] for the next twelve to eighteen months. In the meantime, many are coming to us about a five- to ten-year contract. They’re really going into partnership models.”
This kind of partnership context is very helpful in order to enable long-term investment into systems, structures and technology — crucial for digitalisation. It also, of course, contributes to sustainability goals, a particular driver for the industry at the moment, enabling the creation of MRO bases closer to an airline’s network to reduce the need to fly aircraft many hours to available MRO locations elsewhere.
At its existing bases, HAECO is currently rolling out key MRO progress transparency software that it calls its ‘customer gateway’. This improves information flows and reduces the amount of overhead, and also adds levels of confidence for customers and offers the opportunity for efficiency-improving dialogue.
“The customer gateway is so exciting for me, because that is a solution where our customers can get transparency, real-time, about the progress of work in our shops and aircraft. We had a pilot with Finnair, who used our customer gateway in the first version, and was super happy that they saw how the progress was on the aircraft, to get more insights,” Steinhoff says. “We rolled out to I think two or three customers in the meantime, and that is something we want to follow on [in 2024] — by the way free of charge for our customers — and really try and develop it together.”
The free-of-charge element is a tension seen around the growth of digitalisation, the necessary investment, and the risk that some of this often-expensive digital development becomes seen as a kind of hygiene factor, which customers come to expect as a standard part of the service.
However, Steinhoff says, the focus has to be on the customer and their needs: “the thing with digitalisation is bridging the gap between customers, workshop, transparency and then jointly thinking about how to become more efficient, more customer oriented.”
This is certainly true in automation applications, especially those that are programmatic, algorithmic or include artificial intelligence elements. The use of drones in MRO is an excellent example here.
“We introduced drones in Xiamen a few years ago, and we have some good experience in checking aircraft in an automatic way now,” Steinhoff says, highlighting that key customers are excited to take advantage of the speed and accuracy benefits that this sort of innovation brings.
Indeed, HAECO’s own internal operations are seeing strong benefits from digitalisation. During a tour of the company’s facilities in Hong Kong, we observed its new automated parts inventory, management, storage and delivery system at work. With multiple automated vehicles whirring efficiently up and down the aisles of its newly refitted parts warehouse, the benefits in staff time and the ability to move experienced staffers up the value ladder were clear.
HAECO’s holding group stablemate Cathay Pacific provided flights for our journalist to Hong Kong to enable this interview and other work.
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