Process Mining in Aviation MRO: Reducing Turnaround by 34%

Aircraft maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) is one of the most process-intensive operations in any industry. A single heavy maintenance check involves thousands of tasks, hundreds of parts, dozens of specialists, and a regulatory framework that mandates documentation for every action taken. The complexity creates an environment where inefficiency hides in plain sight.

When a regional MRO operator in the Middle East engaged NEXEL, their stated problem was capacity. Their hangars were fully utilised, turnaround times were stretching, and the waiting list for heavy checks was growing. The instinctive solution was capital investment — more hangar space, more tooling, more staff.

Before committing to that capital programme, NEXEL deployed NexMaps to conduct a process mining analysis of the previous 18 months of maintenance operations. The analysis ingested data from the operator's MRO management system, procurement platform, parts inventory system, and workforce scheduling tool — approximately 4.2 million event records.

The process mining revealed a fundamentally different picture from what operational leadership believed. The actual wrench time — hands-on-aircraft work — accounted for only 38% of total turnaround duration. The remaining 62% was consumed by waiting states: waiting for parts, waiting for engineering dispositions, waiting for quality sign-offs, waiting for documentation approval.

“The biggest delay wasn't in the hangar. It was in the 72-hour gap between inspection sign-off and parts procurement approval.”

The single largest bottleneck was a 72-hour average gap between inspection completion and parts procurement initiation. The root cause was a manual handoff: inspectors would complete their findings, compile a parts list, and submit it to engineering for disposition. Engineering would review, approve, and forward to procurement. Procurement would source and order. Each handoff introduced delay, and the process had no visibility or SLA enforcement.

NEXEL redesigned the workflow to enable concurrent engineering disposition during the inspection phase, supported by a predictive parts pre-staging model that used historical inspection data to anticipate likely material requirements before the aircraft entered the hangar.

Additional interventions included shift-overlap optimisation (reducing the 45-minute average changeover between shifts to 12 minutes through structured handoff protocols) and a real-time progress visualisation system that gave management immediate visibility into each aircraft's status against the planned maintenance schedule.

The results, measured over two complete maintenance cycles post-implementation: average turnaround time reduced from 18.2 days to 11.9 days (34% reduction). Effective hangar capacity increased by 27% without any physical expansion. Annual revenue capacity recovered was valued at $14.2 million.

The lesson for aviation operators — and for process-intensive industries generally — is that capacity constraints are frequently process constraints in disguise. Before building more infrastructure, mine the processes you already have.