Built to deliver: Ontic’s $30 million MRO investment shows early results.

When MRO shares people, space and equipment with production, repairs can lose their place in the queue. Jack Karapetyan, Senior Vice President of Global MRO, and Dave Mayne, MRO Director for Europe & Asia, explain what drove Ontic to run its MRO services separately, and what operators can expect as a result.

Two years ago, we set out plans to give our maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) operations dedicated homes of their own, and to run MRO as a business line in its own right, separate from manufacturing. We have now achieved what we set out to do: our Tewkesbury facility in the UK is open, and our Miramar site in Florida is approved and fully operational.

A sharper focus on MRO 

Until the separation, our repair work sat inside our manufacturing sites - at Bishop's Cleeve and Staverton in the UK - and at Creedmoor and Chatsworth in the US. Our MRO activity also shared its supply chain, operations leadership and quality teams with our OE and spares business. Those teams were balancing three sets of priorities at once: MRO turnaround time, spares provision and new parts delivery to aircraft manufacturers. When all three were competing for the same people, floor space and test equipment, repair turnaround did not always come first.

We now have a whole team – from those on the shopfloor to the customer services operation – whose sole focus is turnaround time and operational performance for MRO customers. The aim was not just to add headcount; it was to give MRO performance a clear owner and give our teams the resources and focus to provide our customers with the service levels they deserve.

The change has benefited our OE manufacturing business too. Moving MRO out of these sites has freed space on both sides of the Atlantic, creating opportunities for future product line acquisitions. Neither side of Ontic is competing with the other for room or resource.

What has been invested

Over the past two years Ontic has invested $30 million globally in MRO, adding 130,000 sq. ft. of space, given over entirely to this division. Around 40% of that new space is deliberately unused, so that we can expand without moving again as we secure further product licences.

Tewkesbury is the latest example. The 72,000 sq. ft. facility brings around 200 MRO specialists together under one roof. The move has added a number of roles already, and we expect the team to keep expanding. At Miramar we have added around 90 people over the same period. Close to 300 people now work in MRO at Ontic, with 110 of them joining in that time.

The global investment has gone into the three areas we see as the main levers on turnaround: people, test equipment and inventory. We have built up our inventory, established exchange pools and duplicated critical test equipment to reduce the dependencies that can delay a repair. Where some customer repairs previously relied on a single test set, we now hold dedicated MRO and OEM test equipment across separate sites, so a problem at one need not hold up the work.

We have also changed how customers work with us. MRO customers now have dedicated key account managers and sales staff, and we have restructured our customer service team. Our 24/7 Aircraft on Ground (AOG) team is based at Tewkesbury, giving operators direct access to technical expertise, spares and repair solutions when an aircraft is grounded. 

What has changed so far

The clearest early evidence of the impact of these investments can be seen at Miramar. In under ten months, turnaround time for vacuum blowers has fallen from around 47 days to 15 days, putting performance ahead of the industry standard for that product line. It shows what can be achieved when people, equipment and inventory are aligned around a single MRO performance objective.

We are now applying the same approach across all our product lines. With the final UK lines moving into Tewkesbury, our process improvement programme is just getting started, so many of the gains at both dedicated MRO sites are still ahead of us.

What comes next

We have built for the long term, not just for today's workload. As new licences come in over the coming years, both Tewkesbury and Miramar will take on more work and more people. At the same time, the space freed at our manufacturing sites in the UK and US gives our OEM business scope to expand alongside them. Until recently, these sites were doing two jobs. Now both business lines have room to grow independently.

What operators want from all of this is simple: an OEM repair, returned within the turnaround time they need, and backed by an OEM warranty. Two years ago, we said we would build an organisation capable of delivering that consistently. That organisation is now in place. Operators will judge us on turnaround times, not square footage, and so will we. 

Jack Karapetyan is Senior Vice President of Global MRO at Ontic, and Dave Mayne is MRO Director for Europe & Asia. Both will be at MRO Europe from 28-29 October on stand 1-142. Pay them a visit to find out how Ontic's investment in MRO can support your fleet for a lifetime of flight.