This and much more was discussed by a diverse group of industry experts at MRO Europe 2018. These are the highlights of the debate.

These are the biggest aviation supply chain challenges

One of the major aviation supply chain challenges that the panel sat down to discuss was whether or not MROs and the affiliated aviation supply chain are ready to handle the expected increase in volume. Across the panel, keywords in this discussion seemed to be collaboration and used serviceable material (USM).

»If you look at the issues today, you notice that the upward supply chain stream is very non-transparent right now. We don’t know what all the MROs are preparing. But if you look downstream, toward the airlines, we seem to have a much more transparent system. I think this is one thing we have to tackle in the future,« argues Vincent Metz, Head of Strategy, Air France Industries KLM Engineering & Maintenance.

For Air France KLM, the strategy for the future seems to be focusing on both optimizing their existing supply chain as well as developing alternatives.

»What we try to do is to look at the microeconomics. There’s a huge amount of new aircraft orders and a lot of production capacity being committed to producing new parts and, of course, we’re worried what will happen with the support of the aftermarket as a result. We try to prepare ourselves by optimizing what we have,« Vincent Metz explains and continues:

»We’re trying to make the best of our current supply chain efforts as well as develop alternative solutions; such as repairing more than replacing, and then we have an active approach in regards to used serviceable material. We dismantle our own aircraft to make sure we have different sourcing options and meet the supply chain demand.«

Alistair Dibisceglia, Technical Procurement and Supply Chain at Alitalia, believes that planning is going to be even more important in the coming years, as there’s most likely going to be a shortage of certain parts and limited maintenance slots.

»At Alitalia, we’re at the very end of the supply chain. For us, the most important thing is to predict and pre-plan what’s going to happen next. We need to make sure we have the slots and material ready, and we can best do that in collaboration with the OEMs and MROs. If we do this in the very last moment, we will fail, because there is a shortage of everything today,« he says.

Stephen Emmert, Director of Business Development with Boeing Global Services, represents the OEMs in the discussion. He also believes collaboration is key.

»From an OEM standpoint, we try to collaborate with our airline and MRO customers, and then we also focus more on including significant aftermarket support. The more insights we can get from the customers and their needs, the better service we can provide,« he says.

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Preparing the aviation supply chain for the challenges of tomorrow