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Improving Your Vision

As the maintenance or operations manager of your company,

you are charged with the responsibility of delivering the most

efficient maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) and mainte-

nance and engineering (M&E) services possible, with the dual

purpose of reducing MRO and M&E costs while keeping down-

time to a minimum. This responsibility exists with every aircraft

you service, starting from day one acceptance of the aircraft

and its maintenance schedule from an OEM and continuing

throughout that aircrafts operational and maintenance life cycle.

As daunting as this may seem, the challenge is amplified by the

persistent, industry-wide pressure to introduce new efficiencies

to further reduce maintenance and engineering costs while simul-

taneously increasing and maximizing operational availability of

the fleet. The pressure is justified, because any aircraft delayed in

maintenance is missing revenue-generating opportunities and

increasing overall maintenance costs. Time is money, and main-

tenance organizations that can harness their experience and

provide mission-critical maintenance support services in the

most robust manner will gain competitive advantages and reduce

overall turnaround times.

SAP Solution Brief

SAP for Aerospace & Defense: Airline Maintenance

and Operations Managers

ASSURING THE SHORTESTPOSSIBLE AIRCRAFTMAINTENANCETURNAROUND TIME

Enable the Prediction and Forecasting of Demandfor Parts and Services

Throughout the airline industry,

maintenance and operations

managers are not able to achieve

the fastest possible aircraft

turnaround times due to the

challenges they face in being

able to accurately predict and

forecast the demand for parts

and services. SAP solutions

designed specifically for airline

maintenance and operations

managers enable collaboration,

global visibility, and proactive

resource monitoring that help

managers reduce aircraft

maintenance and engineering

turnaround times and minimize

delays by accurately planningand predicting the demand for

parts and services.

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To achieve this goal repeatedly, you must be able to predict and

forecast demand accurately. Many maintenance operations

today, however, lack the global visibility and monitoring of the

maintenance schedule needed to prevent surprises that cause

delays in work scope and maintenance due to unavailability of

parts, work space, and personnel with appropriate skills. And

when you dont know availability, you cannot optimize your

work schedules.

MRO operations are often outsourced, but you may not have

supply chain visibility into subcontracted operations, rotable

parts pools, and other critical supply information. Without this

supply chain visibility, it is difficult to know when parts will

be received, causing delays in the maintenance schedule and

requiring manual follow-up. In addition, wrong-part and

wrong-time deliveries can result in further delays.

This lack of vision contributes to the buildup in spare parts,

which dominates the airline industry not only with just-in-time

parts, but also with millions of just-in-case parts on hand.

Although the parts are there, the warehouse and suppliers often

do not have access to the maintenance schedule, and this can

lead to delivery delays. In addition, without adequate supply

chain visibility, incorrect repair-or-replace decisions made during

the strip-and-inspect process can drive up maintenance costs.

The inability of MRO operations to accurately predict and fore-

cast the demand for parts and services is unnecessarily inhibiting

maintenance turnaround time and increasing aircraft downtime.

Solutions from SAP replace this inability with global visibility of

parts and resources, leading to an enhanced ability to manage

parts along the supply chain network. To enable you to reduce

turnaround times and delays, they improve your vision by giving

you the collaborative scheduling and capacity planning tools,

optimized and integrated functions, and proactive monitoring

you need to accurately and dependably predict and forecast

demand for parts and services.

Taking Control

The value of improving your ability to predict and forecast

demand for parts and resources is best seen in the value lost by

not doing so. This lost value for maintenance companies is being

manifested in the following forms throughout the airline

industry:

Delays and lost revenue opportunities When a grounded

plane can cost tens of thousands of dollars a day in lost revenue

that cannot be regained, the concern over the impact of MRO

and M&E expense on the corporate bottom line becomes obvious.

And the impact is multiplied by the number of aircraft needing

maintenance at any given time out of the thousands of aircraft in

service today.

Compounding this lost revenue, as well as your challenge ofproviding the fastest possible maintenance service at the lowest

possible cost, is the average age of an airlines fleet. Decades-old

aircraft are common. Newer aircraft, with their better corrosion

protection and stronger airframes, have a current and long-term

maintenance cost advantage over older aircraft. Together, however,

maintenance operations on old and new aircraft today account

for labor costs that consume the lions share of the total mainte-

nance expense.

Excess inventory capacity The airline industry, as a whole,

sits on billions of dollars of excess capacity in parts. Excess inven-

tory and materials costs significantly increase the annual mainte-

nance budgets of most airline companies today.

Maintenance budget overruns Adding to the strain of excess

inventory are maintenance budget overruns that, due to poor

visibility into availability, can happen any time. These overruns

can take the form of overtime for emergency repairs, airfreight

for materials or spare parts, or loss of spare parts due to faulty

operations.

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For your maintenance company to take control and end these

manifestations of poor vision, you need integrated maintenance

operations across the entire MRO value chain. You require

collaboration capabilities in inventory management and with

suppliers and third-party providers. And you need to provide the

necessary analytics and connectivity tools to enable real-time,

proactive monitoring and decision making for parts and

resources up and down the value chain.

Only a proven and complete solution one with worldwide

implementations, a long track record, and extensive customer

references can deliver truly integrated maintenance operations

to your company. And SAP delivers such a solution.

Closing the Turnaround Gap

Solutions for airline management from SAP directly target thecore processes that drive your maintenance operations. These

solutions help you achieve the following:

Let your suppliers in SAP solutions enable collaborative

replenishment to streamline inventory management. Enhanced

collaboration with suppliers and subcontractors through

collaborative scheduling and capacity planning is what it takes to

minimize delays, assure on-time deliveries, take hold of

inventory availability, and reduce overall turnaround time.

Optimize your processes SAP software supports your most

critical business processes and provides tools to manage these

processes for greater efficiency and effectiveness. By linking

collaborative planning and forecasting into execution, SAP

solutions help you to optimize your maintenance and supply

chain processes, including sales and marketing, maintenance

engineering, advanced planning, maintenance operations, and

parts and tools management processes.

Operate in real time With SAP solutions, you can move from

reactive to predictive maintenance. These solutions supportevent-driven maintenance that uses real-time monitoring

systems to help predict maintenance issues before they occur.

With global visibility and proactive monitoring of component

movements and resource availability across the supply chain

network, your decision-making capabilities are significantly

increased and the decisions you make are improved

proportionally.

Unify your landscape The SAP NetWeaver platform powers

SAP solutions. SAP NetWeaver is a single, integrated platform

that helps you reduce the cost of change by making multiple

platforms behave as one. With powerful data transfer and data

warehousing functionality, SAP NetWeaver helps airline MRO

companies to track inventory and maintenance requirements in

real time, providing a robust foundation for predictive

maintenance initiatives. And by unifying your technology into

one platform, SAP NetWeaver also lowers your total cost of

ownership.

The Benefits of Clear Business Vision

With solutions from SAP, the integration of planning and

analytics processes with your core maintenance and supply chain

processes makes the accurate prediction and forecasting of parts

and resources demand possible avoiding delays, speeding

turnaround, and decreasing downtime. With these solutions,

you can achieve the following benefits:

Improved collaboration When you equip your suppliers and

subcontractors with collaborative scheduling and capacity

planning tools, you improve task and job planning, reduce

waiting time, improve consumables inventory, and lower

inventory purchasing costs.

Optimized processes When you link collaborative planning

and forecasting into execution, you optimize your maintenance

and supply chain processes, resulting in improved productivity,

fewer stock write-offs, enhanced alerts, improved error

detection, and faster problem resolution.

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Better decisions When you have global visibility and real-

time, proactive monitoring across the MRO value chain, your

decisions become more precise, timely, and effective, leading to

optimized repairables inventory and faster aircraft turnaround

times.

Turn It Around with SAP Solutions

To learn more about how SAP solutions can help you reduce

turnaround times and increase uptimes, call your SAP represen-

tative or visit us today on the Web at www.sap.com/industries.

Powered by SAP NetWeaver

SAP solutions are powered by the SAP NetWeaver platform. SAP

NetWeaver unifies technology components into a single plat-

form, allowing organizations to reduce IT complexity and obtain

more business value from their IT investments. It provides thebest way to integrate all systems running SAP or non-SAP

software.

SAP NetWeaver also helps organizations align IT with their

business. With SAP NetWeaver, organizations can compose and

enhance business applications rapidly using enterprise services.

As the foundation for enterprise service-oriented architecture

(enterprise SOA), SAP NetWeaver allows organizations to evolve

their current IT landscapes into a strategic environment that

drives business change.

www.sap.com/contactsap

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