"So many of us come from an aviation background, and we tend to look at what we know most," which is the aviation-related things that the industry is good at making more efficient, said Dave Shotsberger, Continental Airlines senior director technical operations, Southeast U.S., Europe and Caribbean. "But there's a tendency to overlook other significant areas of costs in your operation, such as landscaping expenses, utilities, building rent and nitrogen service. Everything you pay for impacts the bottom line."

And the little things in today's aviation environment could add up enough to tilt the bottom line upward toward profitability or downward toward loss. Do MROs know how much they spend on the little things? People interviewed for this article gave mixed responses, but the consensus, as stated by Bernd Kessler, president and CEO of MTU's commercial maintenance division, is, "You have to understand the costs before you start to cut. Try to uncover the costs: make them visible and then measure." Why? "We have sharks out there called competitors that want to take a piece of the meat that belongs to us, and it's up to us to defend it and keep the business growing."

Know what costs are controllable and which aren't.

The "non-aviation" expenses range from seven percent to 15 percent of an MRO's operating budget, according to Andy Schmidt, Mercer Management Consulting director. Things typically in that bundle include utilities, equipment leases, shop and office supplies, and taxes. "I think one of the reasons why those haven't gotten the kind of attention that labor and materials get is because it is a smaller component of costs," he said.

The other categories are overhead (18 percent to 47 percent, including management), labor (17 percent to 44 percent) and materials (seven percent to nine percent).

Talking with MROs that are attacking the non-aviation bundle of expenses revealed several innovations that are aiding the bottom line and often empowering employees. Most innovations fall into six categories: material waste, waste stream management, facility improvements, procurement efficiencies, energy management and operations processes.

Withering Waste

MTU and American Airlines both switched vendors for scrap metal and profited in doing so. Until 18 months ago, American's local vendor paid the airline $7,000 to haul away its excess material and salvage it, said Steve Grimes, American Airlines product support manager for components and avionics maintenance in Tulsa. "We changed vendors and now we're bringing in more than $150,000 a year in selling off this salvageable material," he said.

ExpressJet Services, a provider of composite, sheet metal and thrust reverser maintenance, got creative in dealing with composites materials, which by its nature generates scrap. The MRO needs qualified technicians and it has a training division, "so when we have any waste material, we just move it to them for their use in the classroom. It works out very well," said Bob McConnell, ExpressJet Services' staff vice president. McConnell said using its own FAA approved maintenance training is cheaper than outsourcing education, too. Besides materials solutions, better waste stream management also is getting attention. Shotsberger said, "Waste stream management can get very, very costly. The key is having a good team that is very familiar with the local, state and federal regulations, and also, very familiar with the operations."