The back office is the brain of the maintenance operation. It's where all airworthiness compliance planning takes place and where task cards are generated and managed. However, some maintenance providers predict this vital area could be commonly outsourced within 10 years. "Airlines have traditionally kept the MRO back office in-house, even as the actual work was sent out," says Gene House, EVP and chief marketing officer at TIMCO Aviation Services. "But now that airlines have become accustomed to subcontracting to lower labor cost providers, many view outsourcing the back office as the next cost savings opportunity." In fact, he reports that TIMCO is actually discussing this with a number of airlines.

House explains that the concept would be most effective if a single provider of back office services could work with multiple airlines, as a consolidator, offering economies of scale. The savings, he says, also would extend beyond in-house IT staffing requirements, since a service consolidator could offer a standardized method of generating and managing job cards, maintenance manuals and procedures used to troubleshoot and carry out repairs for specific aircraft families.

"Let's say there are three different Boeing 757 fleet operators. The chances are, the aircraft are maintained by or for each operator using different procedures," says House. "This means, as more 757 maintenance goes out of house, the MRO company [that services several operators' fleets] would have to train its people to follow the maintenance procedures unique to each operator's aircraft." By adopting one common set of procedures, manuals and back office management--and one training regime for multiple carriers operating the same aircraft type--a tremendous savings in training and administrative costs will be realized, since the mechanics could then be cross-utilized."

House says that as little as 12 months ago, almost nobody was thinking in these terms. However, this is changing as more airlines find themselves dealing with long-antiquated document management technology. "That is not a place where airlines want to invest capital," he says. "They'd rather put that into airplanes and customer service."

At least some degree of MRO back office outsourcing already is taking place. For instance, Wolfgang Weynell, VP marketing and sales for Lufthansa Technik, reports that LHT has offered customized back office management within its Maintenance Management Services (MMS) to those customers with maintenance contracts for the past decade. "LHT's Subcontracted Continuing Airworthiness Management Task (SCAMT) service offers all the lifetime and job control tasks of maintenance functions which are normally a task of the operator but are allowed to be subcontracted," says Weynell. "Due to its modular setup, the service can be adapted perfectly to individual customer needs."

As an example, Weynell explains that of the approximately 1,900 airplanes under the company's Total Component Service Contract program, about 400-500 are under full SCAMT service and the others are under SCAMT, at least in part, or in different specifications. He adds that manage/m, LHT's in-house developed IT platform to support the company's SCAMT services, completely interfaces with other commercial maintenance management systems like AMOS and TRAX. "The data exchange and supervisory function of the customer is absolutely guaranteed," he stresses.

"With the help of SCAMT, the airline can focus on the pure use of the provided data and services," Weynell says. "The airline doesn't need to invest in appropriate IT systems and qualified staff to generate and interpret that information. LHT offers this expertise out of its own SCAMT engineering organization to all of its customers. The single client can benefit from scale effects like shared costs for the sophisticated IT system and the technical expertise of LHT's IT specialists and engineers who are handling and analyzing complex data from many customers."

For the time being, Weynell does not see back office MRO being outsourced by the large, legacy carriers that still perform much of their own maintenance. "It's really the small, leaner carriers where we are seeing most of the demand for SCAMT, because they don't want to invest heavily in engineering and maintenance activities but want to focus on airline operation," he says.

As straightforward as it sounds, outsourcing MRO management must be approached with caution, according to Troy Tomson, services strategy leader for GE Commercial Engines Marketing.

"The current software technology is adequate to perform this [back office outsourcing] task, especially for new engines and aircraft," Tomson remarks. "But, the legacy records from various shops and operators are not currently in consistent a format, which makes it difficult for an MRO to efficiently transition to contracted information management." With increased industry focus on configuration control, "back-to-birth" maintenance records and AD compliance, Tomson points out that any outsourcing of MRO data management would need to be performed by "uniquely qualified third parties who are intimately familiar with worldwide regulatory requirements, as well as the systems and process capabilities to meet these--and any operator specific data requirements."