Why invest in airline asset management software
Airlines today are operating in challenging conditions, navigating high consumer demand with rising fuel prices, labour costs and maintenance expenses. 2024 in particular has seen OEM production pressures lead to the undersupply of aircraft and higher lease rates which are expected to rise further yet (Source: Iba,2023).
Therefore, the need to plan ahead for potential lease returns and extensions has become even more vital – not to mention the importance of maximising maintenance windows in the face of limited MRO capacity.
flydocs Lifecycle Asset Management (LAM) solution is designed specifically to support you with airline asset management challenges. Let’s dive into how LAM can take the strain, freeing you up to focus on vital issues.
How LAM supports Technical teams
Ensure asset compliance with aircraft lease conditions
Typically, your M&E system will be able to compare the status of your assets to airworthiness standards, ensuring you’re meeting each region’s regulatory standards. However, this doesn’t take into account lease conditions which often have different thresholds for component maintenance or replacement.
LAM supports planning by taking your scanned technical documents and lease conditions and digitally extracting key data, so you won’t need to spend time interpreting lengthy clauses! It’ll then compare it to live engineering operational data, whether that’s A/C utilisations, recording status or HT/OCCM listings.
The result? Through the ability to plan ahead and maximise upcoming maintenance windows, you’ll ensure asset compliance with your lease conditions – minimising both unexpected downtime and AOG prices while ultimately, keeping your aircraft in the skies and generating revenue for longer.
Plan ahead to deliver leased aircraft on-time
Upcoming lease renewals, extensions or returns are one of the biggest challenges that technical teams face.
By using aviation asset management software across your fleet, you’ll not only have visibility of where your assets are, but also their predicted status at transition. This allows you to get a real handle of where the main challenges will be during transition and deal with them early to ensure you avoid unexpected MRO time or late penalties.
Additionally, you might want to understand the benefits of extending your aircraft lease. By turning technical data and records into usable insights, plus the ability to model different scenarios, LAM helps asset/fleet managers to make those key decisions in just a few minutes.
Don’t have a dedicated team in-house to manage aircraft transitions? flydocs team of expert engineers can support you, with ad-hoc or ongoing services including on-site or remote transition management, inspections, contract interpretation and more. Check out flydocs Digital Engineering Services for more information.
Gain control and visibility over your fleet’s assets, throughout their lifecycle
The complex landscape of technical records can be challenging to navigate, even if you have a robust digitisation solution (such as flydocs Digital Records Management) in place.
When you don’t have real-time or easy visibility over your fleet, you’re in danger of needing last-minute maintenance that could cost thousands or returning aircraft with brand-new parts.
Instead, you’ll want to maximise the efficiency of each component within your fleet, not only to reduce maintenance time but also to save costs long-term.
By using LAM asset management software across your entire fleet, you’ll also get the benefit of a component and major assembly tracker which tells you exactly where each asset is, in real-time, allowing you to improve asset availability and utilisation.
How LAM supports Finance teams
Understand your airline’s risk and exposure
Whether you’re putting away funds in a maintenance reserve (MR) or preparing for EOL compensation, you’ll want clear visibility to track how your current or predicted funds at any point in time correlate with upcoming maintenance events.
Having a software to support this process allows you to ensure your MR is at an appropriate level, allowing you to both budget effectively and potentially redistribute excess funds to other vital areas.
Maximise the value of your assets
With the need to find cost savings and efficiencies across operational functions, maximising asset value is one way to ensure your airline is getting the most from its current fleet.
LAM offers insight-laden dashboards and forecasting tools, with AI-powered recommendations that allow you to measure the impact of swapping components on utilisation and availability, helping fleet or asset managers to realise cost savings.
Avoid penalties and unexpected costs on leased aircraft transitions
From penalties on non-compliant assets and costs to rework non-compliant repairs, to hefty fees on return delayed aircraft, additional charges can stack up quickly when returning leased aircraft.
With the industry average delay sitting at circa two months, that’s tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds that could be saved by leveraging software and automation to support you.
Along with the reasons we’ve discussed throughout this piece, the right tool that provides integrated data sharing between finance, asset and technical teams can be of huge benefit.
With all teams working from a single-source of truth – albeit with the appropriate controls on who has access to which information – the software can contribute to breaking down organisational silos and support cross-organisational planning, leaving to overall cost savings and vastly improved efficiencies.
Are you keen to learn more about how Lifecycle Asset Management can support your airline? Book a free demo with one of our experts.