Embracing MRO digital transformation

Adnan Mansur, Head of Digital and Innovation Services, Asia Digital Engineering shares ADE’s journey to a digital business

At Asia Digital Engineering (ADE), we have recently undertaken a journey to digital transformation and it is that journey that I’ll be sharing with readers in this article. What is meant by the term digital transformation and why has an MRO business called itself Asia Digital Engineering with no direct reference to aviation or MRO/M&E in the name? And, what is meant by digital transformation? My responsibilities, Digital and Innovation Services, include two core functions which are Software as a Service (SaaS) and Digital as a Service (DaaS). We have found that, while there are plenty of digital solutions on the market, the majority of them do not match the very complex operations in an MRO environment.

Digital Transformation

Salesforce defines digital transformation as, “… the process of using digital technologies to create new or modify existing business processes and customer experiences to meet challenging business and market requirements.”

Digital Transformation Why Now?

The first reason was to achieve an optimized operation. To reduce or remove silos has become a major objective in many aviation businesses today with the goal to increase efficiencies and productivity as well as use technology to reduce costs. Overall, the plan is to improve safety and enhance quality. These are, of course, internal objectives for ADE, the MRO, and they are why it was decided that digital transformation was the way forward. That said, there is another major reason for digital transformation and that is, how could we use technology to provide a better customer experience?

Now that ADE is no longer part of an airline, as you’ll see later, our market is not limited to what were previously internal customers. We now also work for third-party customers. With that, we have to have a way to manage customers including, how do we use technology to ensure that they return with further business? When this project started, our current systems were not optimized for either expansion or for complex operations to improve customer retention. This is a new mindset for ADE, and we need to educate ourselves to keep in mind that a happy customer makes for a happy business. Technology and data will be harnessed for that purpose.

The third reason is to be able to use what we have and double up reasons one and two to help others to optimize their operations and to help them to better serve their own customers in the future, including providing our own software solutions.

There are some guiding principles for digital transformation which we stand by in ADE. There are a lot of technologies available such as blockchain and artificial intelligence but our principle is that we don’t simply implement technology for the sake of technology, there has to be an appropriate and relevant use-case, otherwise the technology will become a white elephant. We innovate to simplify and solve problems with a practical application of technology: not just because we can.

Introduction To Ade

Asia Digital Engineering is an offshoot MRO company and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Capital A Berhad (figure 2).

Most of ADE was previously the engineering department in AirAsia, Malaysia. In September 2020, that engineering department was taken out of the AirAsia airline and was constituted as a new entity called Asia Digital Engineering (ADE) as the engineering arm for the group. It was all done in the middle of the pandemic but that probably accelerated our decision to make the change. ADE is based in Kuala Lumpur, from where we offer the full range of maintenance services, primarily in Malaysia today with multiple presences (figure 3).

In the future, ADE will be expanding operations to neighboring countries including Thailand, Indonesia and Philippines — all places where we already have engineering capacity.