As you introduce new technology products that deliver enormous benefits to airlines, you can have inherent risk. How do we ensure that we work with the airlines and partner with them in a way that they can transfer a lot of that risk back to us? We can give them some very compelling lower maintenance-cost solutions.
In the time and materials (T&M) space, we're very focused on customer service levels. We're very focused on turnaround time. We're very focused on the type of guarantees, warrantees and customer value proposition ideas we can create around our T&M product. We've got some very exciting new products we're going to announce shortly.
In the whole area of repair, we are investing heavily—on the existing legacy portfolio, and we've already started to invest in repair capability for Leap. We have big repair investments for the GEnx and GE90. So, we're continuing to do what we've done for a long time, in terms of delivering competitive cost-effective repair solutions for our customers.
How does Austin Digital play into your offerings? How are you integrating the different data pieces?
We're probably two-thirds of the way on our journey of deciding what our digital offerings are going to be around data for customer productivity. We have a lot of interesting products in the air traffic management space, performance-based navigation space, fuel and carbon space, myEngines, remote monitoring and diagnostics. I would say that we are being cautious about how we introduce new offerings and, therefore, I don't know that we're ready to talk about exactly what they are.
The industry has acknowledged that there is a real opportunity to build customer airline profitability around the use of data. We believe that we have the capability and the competency inside the company, both in terms of existing products, and new products we're developing, and new acquisitions that will really bring a compelling value proposition around data to our customers.
With the leased aircraft fleet growing and lessors looking for service package innovations, such as transferrable maintenance agreements, how do you see services evolving?
It's a key part of the market and given the capital-intensive nature of refleeting, and given the dynamics in the industry, the leasing companies provide a really key area of financing and flexibility to airlines that just is not going to go away. They are an important segment of the market that we have focused on for the last couple of years.
We announced earlier this year a portable maintenance and service product offering that has been met with some strong interest from the leasing companies. Their interests are aligned with the airlines, which is, 'how do you lower maintenance costs in a reliable way?'
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