As the world of maintenance, repair and overhaul — MRO — evolves, so does the technology stack that supports it.
At the forefront of incorporating new technologies, MRO houses and the wider industry are bringing everything from on-site additive manufacturing to cloud computing into their operations.
“The challenges faced by the MRO industry — including labour shortages, ageing workforce, and supply chain disruptions — have all been exacerbated in the wake of a post-COVID-19 recovery,” Summit Chan, group director corporate development at HAECO, tells us. “MRO players need to increasingly turn to digitalisation and technological innovations to maintain work efficiency and performance, reduce aircraft downtime, and keep up with their competition.”
In this context the MRO technology stack is evolving too, adapting to established and emerging technologies including robotics, automation, sensors, additive manufacturing, big data, and the Internet of Things. Often, these are driven from outside the company, by manufacturers, suppliers and airline or operator customers.
“At the same time, we have been developing customised cloud-based software to improve internal work processes and integrate them with our new technological hardware,” Chan says. “Our core enterprise applications are SAP, AMOS, and a new generation MRO Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) that helps automate and manage our core business processes to drive optimal performance. We are co-developing the ERP with a strategic IT partner, and these core systems will eventually be migrated to the cloud platform.”
In many ways the industry can be divided into a world before COVID-19 and the world since its arrival, and this is certainly the case in technology stacks — particularly around software.
“HAECO has significantly increased its usage of cloud computing since 2019, such as in our core ERP’s operations and as a central data platform for digital products development,” Chan says. “We have been working closely with Microsoft and leveraging the Microsoft Azure Data Platform to take advantage of its flexibility, security and useful analytical tools.
More widely, a critical part of the technology stack — making data available and agreeing its use — is often the most challenging.
“Modifications always require thorough and accurate data,” Nina Schulz, managing director of IAMA, the Independent Aircraft Modifier Alliance, tells us. “The more complex newer aircraft types are, the more important is the reliability on accurate data. Hence, exchange and access agreements become even more important than they have been.”
Integration with newer manufacturing technologies, Schulz says, will become increasingly important, even in the MRO world. “3D printing is also one of the very important newer topics. This technology can support quicker implementation of changes as supply chains still remain a struggle.”
As 3D printing and its industrial-level sibling additive manufacturing move from prototyping towards widescale distributed production, the need to integrate them into technology stacks from predictive maintenance to warehousing to distribution will grow.
“On the software side the use of AI becomes increasingly interesting, and the speed of its use and implementation is breathtaking. AI can already support research and planning processes — like job card engineering in planning — and most probably we will soon see steps also into design topics,” Schulz explains. “Personally I think the speed of the implementation of AI is the most astonishing topic. In the past, new technologies and developments always needed significant time to mature. Currently tools are available for almost everybody. While this is really inspiring and might be game changing — especially for the fights around scarce capacities — I also see some challenges that we jointly need to tackle.”
Here, she emphasises, “education, training and experience are the main pillars for safety in aviation. The use of AI will support the industry, but will require certain safety nets to ensure oversight and execution.”
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