PA Consulting, the global innovation and transformation consultancy, has today announced the launch of Optima, a service to transform airline engine cost efficiency.
Optima is a collaboration between PA, DecisionBrain – leaders in advanced planning and scheduling optimization solutions – and TGIS Aviation, experts in Powerplant management. Together they will work to significantly reduce airlines’ operational and lease return costs for their aircraft engines, while enhancing efficiency and end-of-life asset opportunity.
Trials with commercial airlines have identified through-life savings of £500 million, and individual savings of £200 million for a single European flag carrier. These savings go beyond those offered by traditional cost optimisation practices.
Optima combines PA’s deep aviation finance expertise and TGIS’s powerplant management expertise with DecisonBrain’s advanced decision intelligence technology.
Optima draws together billions of maintenance combinations, operational scenarios, and contractual constraints, the approach considers a wider and deeper range of operating, contractual, and maintenance scenarios than previously humanly possible.
The outcome is a robust plan optimised for whole life fleet cost. And once the optimised plan is mobilised, progress is regularly tracked to plan and reoptimized as real-world conditions evolve; the plan is then kept on track for the forecasted savings.
Optima focuses on three areas to enhance airlines’ bottom line:
- Shop visit optimization: fine-tuning engine shop visit planning and scheduling. Minimising wasted LLP life and underutilised spares and shifting the constraints of maintenance shops, providing a streamlined, manageable maintenance plan across the entire fleet lifespan.
- Minimising lease return compensation: balancing detailed lease return conditions and financial compensation terms for each individual engine to produce a maintenance plan that reduces the lease return costs.
- End-of-life and retirement opportunity: planning engine use down to the module and LLP level, ensuring engine fleets are fully utilised, irrespective of size or complexity. In addition, identifying and preserving engines with a high potential for resale at fleet retirement.
