Aviation industry for most people associates with flights, airports and travels. However, the industry, whose recent revenue is yearly growing by almost 10% includes a lot of not visible businesses that keeps the aviation industry ongoing: aircraft maintenance (MRO), spare parts supply, ground handling, fuel distribution and many more. Since every single aircraft around the world has to go through a routine check before each single flight, it is of high importance for the airlines and maintenance organizations to have reliable partners for spare parts supply at any time of the day, 24/7.
“Trustworthy Airlines, that have intention to perform their flight on scheduled time, as well as maintenance organizations that are willing to take qualified care of their client aircraft repair processes as fast as possible, need to have a constant access to spare parts stock and plan the correct amount of orders for specific aircraft maintenance. Reliability of spare parts provider is vitally important as well, while safety is undoubtably the most important thing in aviation,” says Yaoju Yu, Asia Development Manager at aircraft parts marketplace Locatory.com. “If the flights are delayed, passengers are late, and the airlines make their providers pay fines for the delays. All subjects are interconnected and at the end often depend on timely spare parts delivery time. However, new digital technologies and special artificial algorithms allows the maintenance providers to save bulk of time and find the needed parts for prompt aircraft maintenance 24/7, even in a native language”, adds specialist of the aircraft parts supply platform.
From the earlier times, when the Chinese market began to shift from individual point-to-point contact to each separate provider, brokerage companies only began to emerge. At this moment, China has hundreds of brokerage companies whose daily work is to mediate between the buyer and seller, as well as proceed to develop guanxi. It became uncomfortable but usual to request separate orders of aviation parts and components through trading intermediaries, who on the once side has chain of providers of use specific marketplaces, but deal with suppliers one-by-one, however on the other side, they arrange documents for customs, take care of dispatches and do other administrative work.
On average, only a process of assortment availability check may take up to 5 days, depending on the capabilities of the spare parts provider. Yet using modern online systems, it is no longer necessary to check or ask for each individual supplier’s range, while each needed spare part can be instantly found in stock online in real time. Besides that, the same platform can be used for a secure Escrow payment as well as customized dispatch services can be requested right here also.
Such a philosophy of convenience and affordability for different markets and needs is driven in the spare parts marketplace Locatory.com, which is probably the only company of this type that applied their platform for Chinese market and provide to the market additional functionality driven by Artificial Intelligence technologies. The abovementioned allows users to let the system automatically collect data and do the research even being mobile and off the platform.
“Asian market is extremely important in aviation industry. At the moment, it is the fastest growing aviation market in the world and, according to IATA, soon enough will overcome the United States, hence our technological advantage allows Chinese companies to order the spare parts 70 percent faster than it used to be in previous experience elsewhere – our software does the search in 20 seconds. This means that the brokers and, eventually, the end-users have the opportunity to maintain more aircraft or supply more companies in the same time manner,” says Dainius Meilunas, CEO at Locatory.com and enthusiast of innovative IT solutions. “From the very beginning the goal of our company was to become the closest customer-reaching online platform, bringing together suppliers and customers on their daily standard needs and AOG situations. And for the moment, Locatory.com do provide buyers and suppliers with all most comprehensive spare parts for business jets and commercial aircraft in Chinese market: Western and Russian build aircraft, as well as helicopters”, mentions the CEO of the company.
Being a part of Avia Solutions Group, a global holding company for diverce aviation industry services and IT solutions, Locatory.com knows the newest trends of the industry and can adapt to them significantly fast. Due to this, the company continuously upgrades their system to Asian and worldwide regions` needs.
Though customers commits the platform as Aliexpress prototype in the aviation spare-parts market, the system throughout five years of activity has expanded widely and for the moment is working with the leading industry partners in China and the world, such as HNA Technic, Hainan Airlines, Tianjin Airlines, Beijing Capital Airlines.
While casual routine is becoming much easier with innovative IT solutions and specified software it allows speeding up the pace of development of all the industries. Therefore, the expansion of IT market, usage of AI and virtual assistants penetrated even a very conservative and extremely structured aviation industry. All that allows one to forecast more of positive changes in this highly developing industry.
