Industry challenges in Converting Service Sale RFQ from Customers to Confirmed Orders in Aviation MRO Industry

On a global scale the air traffic passenger demand is maintaining a positive growth, despite the number of challenges faced by the airline industry with respect to high Jet fuel prices, shortage of materials, skilled labor shortage. This in turn had opened the wide market opportunities in the aftermarket service segment for OEM’s and Non-OEM’s to address the airplane shortage in global fleets. This pressurizes the MRO’s to do more in less time.

In this competing market the response time to operators RFQ’s with best profitable estimates based on the past experience also plays a key role by the commercials team of the MRO companies. With the industry experience, it has been observed that currently MRO’s are facing multiple challenges in addressing an RFQ from customer, due to non-availability and usage of technology touch in their customer Quotation and Order confirmation process.

Majority of the MRO’s use the ERP’s for recording the execution process. However, many ERP’s have failed in addressing the RFQ to Order confirmation process. Where this is handled manually by extracting the reports and validating.

What are the Challenges:

1. The major challenges in this process are:
2. Transformation of customers Work package to the MRO’s interface/process is a major challenge which most of the MRO’s currently face.
3. Efforts involved in providing estimates for repetitive/similar work scope is time consuming due to lack of options to retrieve and compare the inputs from history data.
4. Traceability of the quotation revisions and it’s responses from quote to billing cycle.
5. Facilitating the additional work scope during the induction and execution phases.

Process Flow:

What are the customer requirements?

1. Currently, MRO’s receive the work packages from the operators through .pdf/ html format. From there the MRO planning team verifies the availability of TASK in the existing system and then creates manually. User expects a provision to upload the work package and system itself should identify the new TASKs and create them. Then user can define only relationship between the TASKs and proceed further.
2. Usage of history data in preparing the Quotations. Which help the planning and commercials team to work only on the new set of TASKs instead of providing efforts manually against each TASK.
3. Traceability from the stage when the 1^st Quotation was submitted to customer by MRO till the final estimates’ customer MRO’s expect traceability on the instances where the revisions have been occurred. The key areas which are going under multiple iterations can be brough under the contract with standard clauses, which can benefit the MRO’s
4. Customer approval through customer portal for initial and incremental revisions and estimates/ quotations
5. Provision for converting the Confirmed Quotation to Customer Order

How IFS can help in overcoming these challenges?

1. Transformation of Work Packages (in RFQ) in less TAT: Using IFS Service Quotation component the work package in RFQ can be transformed.
2. Generating Quotation from the System: IFS facilitates generating Quotation for Emergent work arising out of preliminary work package.
3. Customer communication through Portal Access and Status update: This is feasible through IFS B to B functionality.
4. Converting Quotation to Order on customer Acceptance: IFS facilitates the functionality to generate order based on customer confirmation.
5. Provision to add/ remove TASKs on actual aircraft Arrival: Using service quotation module in the IFS addition/ deletion of TASK is feasible.

About Ajay : Aviation Practice Consultant, over 11 years of experience in Airline & MRO Industry. Responsible for providing IT solution & full cycle ERP Implementation Projects Globally with strong understanding of the business domain and application of new and emerging technologies.

Linkedin Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajaykumar-suru-586a5557