How to Save Money on MRO Work With a Consolidated Billing System

The aircraft MRO industry is a vast and complex support industry. In 2020, it was valued at around $49.8 billion to $70 billion, with an expected compound annual growth rate of over four percent. The global technician workforce is poised to demand more than 600,000 workers over the next twenty years. The global fleet will grow by about three percent over that time. The demand for new techs and growing fleets will strain the current billing systems.

AireXpert offers you the solution you have been looking for: a consolidated billing system that will grow with your company and fleet.

What Is A Consolidated Billing System

Aircraft MRO is a fascinating industry. Since airplanes are such large, complex ecosystems, there is a significant demand for specialists who only service a specific system or subsystem. You know what it looks like. Before you know it, you are working with dozens of sub-contractors servicing your fleet of jets. So who is keeping track of all work?

Most air carriers' maintenance operations have invoices from dozens, maybe even hundreds of individual MROs doing all kinds of jobs. Everything from engine repairs and overhauls down to centering cylinders is sent out for repair, most of which are not going to the same shops.

We provide a solution for this problem. All of your service invoices go into a single system. But beyond controlling invoicing, it is also a single source for vendors to input hours worked towards a specified task.

All tasks are broken down and applied to each aircraft by registration, so there is no question about what work was done for which aircraft. In addition, it allows your billing department to quickly identify work done outside your specified parameters.

In What Way Is Money Lost Through Billing Without One?

In a nutshell, money floats away when your organization loses track of vendors. Unfortunately, vendors who will take advantage of your billing department either lack familiarity with tasks or, more likely, your organization is overwhelmed and overburdened with invoices you cannot track.

Invoices get stacked up, and the invoice gets paid instead of inventorying goods or services delivered. Rinse and repeat with a few dozen other vendors, and you have completely lost track and control over your budget.

We hate to point it out, but if a vendor knows they can just throw a flat charge of ten hours on an invoice for two hours of work, and it never gets questioned, they will probably keep doing it. It sets a poor precedent; how can you then go back and approach the vendor about billing if you have continued to approve invoices without requiring proof of hours worked?

How you handle vendors moving forward is certainly your business. Still, AireXpert’s consolidated billing will provide a tool to determine what has been accurate billing, inflated and what invoicing (or work to be performed) is still blowing in the breeze.  

AireXpert Consolidates All Vendor Activity in One Place

Our system is designed to give you peace of mind by making everything easy to read, track, and access in one single source of truth.

We have developed our system to assign all work by aircraft registration number. It is a user-friendly interface for every vendor to access entry. Your maintenance team will immediately identify what work has been done by registration number, what is still due out for maintenance, and what the invoice status is.

We believe this feature is essential for fleets of every size, but it compounds with a more significant fleet. Your maintenance management and execs should have immediate visibility into the status of outsourced maintenance at their fingertips, which is what we provide.

Endless spreadsheets are convoluted, hard to follow, and messy. They're poor for instant cataloging where you stand with maintenance status and billing. We aim to make your life easier, by optimizing our service on a mobile-friendly platform. Spreadsheets are poor for mobile use and challenging to track input.

AireXpert is your secure service that verifies that only individuals who have credentials have access. Why is this important?

When a third-party vendor is repairing hydraulic actuators for your fleet, you need to know that it is being tracked accurately by the authorized individual. Paper invoices? Who even knows who drafted it?

Accurately Tracks Vendor Maintenance Hours

We stated earlier that a major cause of overbilling is a lack of oversight in hours tracked.

Consider this: say the average hourly rate your MRO vendors charge is $100. You average ten hours of work per invoice, but the actual number is closer to three hours worked for every ten hours billed. So that’s $700 per month overbilled. Now let’s think about this times one hundred vendors. Those “rounding errors” start to add up to big numbers. $700,000 isn’t a rounding error anymore. Monitoring every single hour closely is imperative because they do add up quickly.

But there is a flip side: your invoices being out of control will drive away your good clients. If you can’t or don’t have your house in order, and your invoices are late getting paid, the good vendors will leave. Losing good, honest, reliable vendors is just as detrimental to your operation as getting gouged by the bad ones.

You must retain good vendors, so track the work and get invoices paid. Bad or poor workmanship will cost you, and AireXpert is your tool to ensure you are working with the right vendors.

Wrapping Up

Your flight operations are wholly dependent on the quality of your maintenance operations. In the modern maintenance landscape, much of the work is outsourced to sub-contracted MROs, and tracking these is a heavy burden on your billing department. However, we have a simple solution to your complex problem, so check it out today!