How to decide

When choosing between owning your own stock or entering into a VMI or pooling agreement, it’s important to consider the advantages and disadvantages of each solution.

When stocking your own parts, you don’t have to pay any vendor fees, but you’ll have to cover the cost of carry, invest in labour and make the initial investment on your repair and modification activities.

For VMI and pooling agreements, airlines and MROs will save on order administration and transport costs and will have fewer capital investments, but will of course have to pay for the VMI service itself. There may also be additional costs in ensuring that their IT setup will work with the vendor’s systems.

“No matter which concept you go with, there will always be a trade-off between savings and costs,” Heuser said.

But cost is just one factor in deciding which spares access concept is best, Heuser says. He says it’s also important to consider certain basic facts like fleet size and material category, existing aspects like your parts and materials know-how and your current stock, and operational and management decisions like investment willingness and supplier relationships.

Heuser, who says “there’s no one size fits all solution” when it comes to spares access concepts, breaks down the three main options and how to go about making your decision in the video embedded above.

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Spare aviation parts: Stock your own or outsource?