Hierarchy of Roadmap Items: Prioritization Strategy Development in Aircraft MRO Industry to Enhance Profit and Sustainability

Abstract

Aviation’s global aftermarket is expected to grow 22% in 2023, topping $94 billion, and will reach $125 billion by 2033 with a 2.9% compound annual growth rate. Besides that, the aircraft maintenance industry operates in a highly dynamic and competitive environment where ceaseless development is a requirement to ensure continuity, profitability, and sustainability. Hence, and based on the actual technological level and so striving for higher level advancement and introduction of new technologies and processes in this area, a significant number of research and development projects are under way or in the pipeline. With so many new ideas and innovations, it is hard for the upper management to make informed decisions and be sure that those decisions are what the company needs. Usually, these decisions are mainly made from one or a set of managers’ points of view. However, the decision might not be suitable from a scientific point of view due to the numerous factors, data, and concerns that are very hard to spot without a numerical perspective. Hence, it is important to create a scientific strategy to prioritize these new ideas or items based on accurate factors and indications to give a vision of what is the most needed idea to adopt by the company. This is what the present paper is focused on. A case study investigation was made herein, where after collecting all the proposed ideas and development areas from the assigned managers and decision-makers, a prioritization was made. The ideas were ranked based on a novel hierarchy model which was developed to govern the development process of the maintenance repair and overhaul activity in the optimum and effective way to reach the set expectations. It means that the companies can have a scientific tool to point at the development direction that they should follow, and their focus will be shed on the most essential activities at hand and aim to get the most value towards the fulfilment of the upper management goals and stakeholders’ vision. The proposed framework has assessed three different groups of aircraft maintenance development concepts based on a set of picked criteria and concludes which out of the three should be pursued next for more development. The results taken from the created framework showed that the "Development and Digitalization of the Operational Process for MRO Applications" topic is the most interesting one with 34 scores, which is higher than the second one by 21%. The proposed solution not only showed the reliability of this framework to give good decision support but also showed that it could build a suitable, unified structure and procedure to follow while determining the company’s future development direction.