Industry
Manufacturing
Future-Ready Manufacturing: Partnering in your journey to a sustainable manufacturing enterprise
Highlights
- The maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) function is facing a perfect storm today, with a steadily rising demand. The trend toward repairing components rather than replacing them, along with the introduction of novel technologies, has revolutionized the MRO sector.
- The future of MRO will be about embracing emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning (AI-ML), computer vision, and augmented, virtual, and extended reality (AR-VR-XR) to unlock unprecedented efficiencies and drive intelligent operations.
- We see the next-gen MRO as being data-driven, agile, and intelligent, ensuring reduced costs, faster turnarounds, safer skies, and a sustainable future.
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Turbulent times for aviation MRO
The aerospace and defense (A&D) industry today is grappling with backlogs, supply chain disruptions, and global trade shifts.
The delay in ramp-up of production due to supply chain and quality issues has resulted in aircraft operators having to extend the utilization of existing fleet. This has meant more load on MRO shops, both independent and airline-owned, impacting turnaround of aircrafts. MROs are also dealing with complexity that comes along with having a mixed fleet – aircrafts with latest technologies and older legacy aircrafts. The global MRO market is expected to grow to $134.07 billion by 2030, with a CAGR of 4.8%.
Key challenges faced by MROs are:
- Material shortage: Supplier quality, delivery, and planning
- Labor and material cost management: Inflation and tariffs impact margins
- Skilled workforce demand: By 2037, the MRO industry would need over 600,000 qualified maintenance professionals
- Ability to plan and predict maintenance events
When combined, all these factors highlight the critical need for a scalable, intelligent system that can help MROs across key areas such as smart material and resource planning, digitized pre-check and check templates, work pattern recognition, and AI-led trainings for skill improvement.
The Case for tech-driven MRO reimagination
Digitalization is no longer optional—it is survival!
Modern aircraft can produce over 840 terabytes of data per flight, yet less than 5% of it is leveraged for maintenance decision-making. This is a massive lost opportunity. Smart, AI-ML powered systems can use all this data to generate priceless insights, which will empower the MROs to shift from reactive actions to proactive maintenance planning. Studies show that digital MRO solutions can reduce costs drastically and cut turnaround time significantly.
Futuristic MRO environments will seamlessly integrate aircraft telemetry, technician profiles, and parts logistics into unified platforms for real-time feedback loops and operational agility. With AI-led workflows, teams will be able to take faster and efficient decisions, reduce manual errors, and ensure near-zero compliance issues. Harnessing such intelligence won’t just make MROs more efficient, it would in fact be a paradigm shift to a high-reliability, insights-driven, connected ecosystem.
Smart directive and bulletin management
AI agents are the new-age inspectors.
With the emergence of modern aircraft, Airworthiness Directives (ADs) and Service Bulletins (SB) are becoming increasingly frequent and complex—over 4,000 ADs were issued globally in 2023 alone. Traditional review processes involve sifting through packed documentation and matching directive conditions to specific aircraft configurations. All this is time-consuming, open to human subjectivity, and in turn, error prone.
Advancements in natural language processing (NLP) and knowledge graphs now enable AI agents to parse these directives with unprecedented speed and accuracy and interpret with contextualization. These agents can identify impacted aircraft, categorize tasks by urgency, and suggest streamlined activity plans. When integrated with operational systems, we observed that these tools could reduce directive processing time by up to 40%. Such embedded intelligence empowers engineering teams to act swiftly and with greater precision, minimizing both compliance risk and ground time.
Future-ready workforce
It is all about the right task mapped to the right skill at the right time.
Misaligned and inefficient task allocation and tracking continues to impact productivity across MRO lines. A dynamic workforce system, powered by AI, can address this gap by learning from historical performances, certifications, technical ask, complexity, and real-time skill-based availability.
Such a platform will recommend optimal assignments and redistribute workloads when disruptions like technician absence or aircraft swaps occur. They also prioritize critical-path tasks and align technician expertise with job complexity. This level of intelligence can improve labor utilization by up to 25% and drive consistency in service delivery.
A majority of the MRO industry leaders report that workforce readiness is a major hurdle to scaling operations (IATA). Emerging learning platforms now use AI to tailor development journeys based on real-time skill data and job demands.
By continuously analyzing task performance and identifying task rework, these systems recommend individualized training interventions. Augment reality walkthroughs, just-in-time learning modules, and digital twins bring immersive, contextual knowledge to the shop floor. AI can forecasts future skill needs and suggests reskilling paths. This turns training from a compliance burden into a strategic growth tool, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and readiness.
The predictive maintenance edge
Mantra of the day: Fix before failure!
Airlines lose over $10 billion annually due to unscheduled maintenance and associated delays. Predictive maintenance is rapidly becoming a linchpin for operational reliability. Using AI models in tandem with ML-led interpretation of computer vision based systems and AR, VR, and XR simulations, trained on historical telemetry and failure patterns, these systems will be able to detect micro-anomalies in engine behavior, fluid dynamics, avionics, and more. Such a system would also scan through ATC, pilot, and flight logs to search a needle in the haystack, otherwise invisible to human detection, and pin-point potential issues well before they trigger faults.
Maintenance schedules can thus be adjusted dynamically, cutting unnecessary inspections and pre-positioning spares before failure occurs. The result: aircraft-on-ground time reduced by up to 25%, extended component life, and smoother operational flows. As predictive layers connect with task planning and workforce systems, maintenance becomes a coordinated, anticipatory process. This convergence of insights and automation ensures not just fewer surprises—but better economics.
The power of visual intelligence
Machines never blink – they see the unseen before it becomes a delay.
Inspection remains one of the most critical—and open-to-interpretation phases of MRO. Human fatigue, subjectivity, variability in inspection standards, and access challenges limit traditional visual checks. Post analyses studies suggest significant recurring defects to visual oversight. Deep learning-enabled computer vision is changing this paradigm.
By analyzing images from drones, mobile devices, high-definition cameras, and borescopes, AI-ML systems will be able to detect defects with near-zero overlook. These systems will be smart enough to identify corrosion, cracks, missing fasteners, and so on, in real time – even under poor lighting or tight spaces. Each image will also add to a continuously learning defect repository, improving detection with every cycle. Such solutions will reduce inspection cycle times by nearly 40% while raising quality assurance (QA) standards across the MRO landscape.
The future – connected, agile, adaptive, intelligent
Tomorrow’s MRO will think, adapt, and scale.
As civil aviation scales newer peaks, it is imperative that the MROs envision beyond incremental improvements and embrace systemic transformation. The future belongs to integrated platforms that interlink directives and bulletin interpretation, workforce intelligence, real-time task management, smart visual QA, inventory analysis and management, and predictive analytics into one integrated ecosystem.
When these capabilities converge – powered by AI, computer vision, robotics and machine learning – MRO becomes not just smarter, but more resilient. Downtime is minimized, compliance is embedded by design, and technician effort is amplified through intuitive digital assistance. By tapping into these emerging technologies cohesively, operators gain the agility to meet the growing demand without compromising either safety or profitability. It is not about patching the old – it is about re-imagining the next era of aircraft maintenance!
