The aerospace industry is experiencing a fundamental shift in how aftermarket services are delivered. As airlines and operators face mounting pressure to optimize operational efficiency while managing costs, the traditional reactive approach to maintenance is giving way to sophisticated predictive models that promise to increase MRO efficiency, improve inventory management, and reduce downtime. However, to unlock this potential, OEMs and prime contractors need to rethink how they align their MRO capacity with parts availability, and what role their supply chain planning systems will play in optimizing allocation decisions and enhancing the alignment of planning and execution.
How power-by-the-hour and performance-based logistics are rewiring A&D supply chains
Airlines today operate in an environment where every hour of aircraft downtime translates to lost revenue. With narrow profit margins and intense competitive pressure, carriers are increasingly drawn to "power-by-the-hour" and other performance-based logistics contracts that shift maintenance risk to OEMs, operators, or lessors while guaranteeing aircraft availability. These service models have fundamentally altered the value proposition in aerospace aftermarket, moving from selling parts to selling guaranteed performance.
Simultaneously, the proliferation of sensors, IoT devices, and advanced analytics capabilities has made it possible to monitor aircraft systems in real-time with unprecedented granularity. Modern commercial aircraft generate terabytes of operational data during each flight, creating opportunities to predict component failures weeks or months before they occur. This wealth of information is transforming maintenance from a scheduled, calendar-based activity to a condition-based, data-driven operation.
While the potential benefits are transformational, data integration remains a significant barrier to success. Information must be collected from multiple sources, standardized, and analyzed in near real-time. Many legacy systems were not designed for this level of integration, let alone complexity of analysis.
[Read more: How Bell Textron soared to new heights in supply chain planning]
Why better MRO starts with data integration
To unlock the benefits of integrated, real-time operational data, aerospace supply chains must unite disparate sources into a single platform. While traditionally, this has required time-consuming, complex migrations processes involving multiple stakeholders, today that is no longer the case.
At Kinaxis, our supply chain data fabric consists of three interconnected layers:
- Data integration services: Connecting diverse data sources using APIs, repositories, and pipelines
- Data management: Ensuring data quality, governance, and lineage tracking
- Data intelligence: Adding structure and context to enable intelligent decision making
Combined, these layers make it possible to aggregate data, eliminate silos, improve agility, and drive faster, smarter decision making through AI and predictive analytics. When these capabilities are united on a supply chain orchestration platform, OEMs and prime contractors enhance their real-time planning and predictive capabilities.
For example, data from planes about flight hours, environmental conditions, and operational stress helps predict component wear patterns and failure probabilities, which in turn, allows suppliers to move beyond historical averages to aircraft-specific, route-specific maintenance forecasting. Aggregating data across entire fleets can then allow OEMs to identify systematic issues, optimize maintenance procedures, and predict spare parts demand with greater accuracy than ever before. Supply chain planners can even better predict regional maintenance demand, optimize base capacities and slot allocations, and control spare parts availability against defined service levels.
Collectively, these approaches reduce turn-around times, limit plane downtime, and make maintenance costs and potential penalties for OEMs and MRO providers more manageable and predictable.
[Read more: Three critical areas of improvement for the future of A&D supply chains]
Blue skies ahead: The future of aerospace aftermarket supply chains
The trajectory of aerospace aftermarket supply chains is clear. As sensor technology becomes more sophisticated and machine learning algorithms improve, organizations with a mature data fabric and orchestrated planning capabilities will see exponential improvements in predictive maintenance accuracy and operational efficiency.
The future belongs to organizations that can create self-improving systems—where each maintenance event, operational anomaly, and supply chain response feeds back into the system to enhance future predictions and decisions. This requires not just advanced technology, but a fundamental reimagining of how data, systems, and processes work together in an orchestrated supply chain environment.
The companies that successfully navigate this transition will be those that view it not simply as a technology upgrade, but as a fundamental reimagining of how value is created and delivered in the aerospace aftermarket.
Kinaxis helps aerospace supply chains across a wide range of subverticals and manufacturing environments, including commercial, defense, space systems, and MRO. Learn more about what we do.
