Home | Blogs | 28-4-2022

FTAI Aviation (“FTAI”) offers a range of services to airlines, MRO and lessor customers worldwide, including aircraft and engine leasing, engine modules and maintenance services, and part-out services. The lessor’s partnership with a major North American-based MRO, ensures that its high-value assets are well maintained and serviceable.

The Need

As engines approach their lease expiry, the FTAI team works with their MRO partners to perform engine shop visits and re-certify them before they can be delivered to the next customer.

Historically, FTAI managed this complex process, just as many lessors do, using Excel spreadsheets and email communication. The parallel, back-and-forth email communication and the inability to track projected versus actual timelines across spreadsheets made the process extremely cumbersome and caused notorious maintenance and repair delays.

Given its growth ambitions, FTAI had the vision to automate the management and oversight of shop visits, helping to streamline the information flow to track workscopes, resulting in better predictability around timelines and costs, while saving millions of dollars in the process.

Additionally, centralizing the information would help FTAI better understand the root cause of delays and analyze trends. The lessor could take corrective action with the MRO and be able to better anticipate issues ahead of future shop visits in real time versus the lag that occurred when FTAI had to rely on consolidating multiple spreadsheets.

“We needed to automate this complicated engine shop visit process to reduce downtime on our engines and avoid unnecessary costs, and we needed a way to collaborate directly with the MRO by capturing all the tasks, timelines and communications related to a shop visit in a centralized place,” pointed out Julie Malabossa, Director of Operations for FTAI’s Module Factory program. 

The Solution

FTAI was already using LeaseWorks’ CRM module for facilitating internal Contact and Deal Management processes, as well as the LeaseWorks Customer Portal to coordinate tasks with airline customers.

“The open and collaborative nature of that implementation and the continued support they received from the LeaseWorks team led FTAI to extend the technology to another set of key stakeholders, its MRO partners,” said Angela Balzano, Product Manager.

LeaseWorks deployed the MRO Portal, a shop visit management solution, to enable FTAI to collaborate directly with their MRO partners in a centralized location, providing both companies’ teams with the ultimate visibility into project progress, delays, and all communications related to the shop visit.

With the LeaseWorks platform, the team at FTAI and their counterparts can now log in to the MRO Portal to get real time information they need, share updates, track progress, and categorize delays.

Additionally, FTAI can visualize aggregated patterns around recurring issues that may cause time delays or cost overruns by engine type, modules, or other factors. LeaseWorks reports and dashboards also make it easy for the Technical team and management to get visibility on all aspects of their MRO relationship, such as engine status, costs, estimated timelines and potential delays.

“At Leaseworks, our mission is to help lessors embrace the digital world and help them become nimble by spending less time chasing information and more time making decisions. We work closely with our customers to understand problems and deliver timely digital solutions to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and accelerate their digital transformation initiatives,” concluded Haseem Vazhayil, LeaseWorks President & Chief Executive Officer.

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