Airbus will open a new Customer Care Center in Toulouse in December, where at one location some 1.000 engineers from Customer Services, Engineering, and Suppliers will offer in-fleet support to airline customers. The aim of co-locating the teams is to improve the efficiency and speed of its services. Airbus concentrates customer care center in one place. “It is the accumulation of some over 1.000 engineers who are working already today at Airbus but at different organizations and in different buildings. We are going to co-locate them all," said Klaus Roewe, Head of Airbus Services during an online media event on October 14. “The mission of this all is to take of our customers 24 hours a day, seven days a week for whatever comes along. It can be reactive support because a customer for a reason has an aircraft-on-ground (AOG). It can be to improve our corrective support when there are major in-service problems. But it can also be anticipated support, which means we are being prepared for something that hasn’t occurred yet.” Currently, Airbus Services has a structure that includes seventeen Flight Operations Centers across the world. Primarily for language reasons as well as to cover the local market best, the FOC in Beijing will be kept on as a dedicated center. But the other centers will be co-located and also include key suppliers “because in many cases, suppliers are involved in technical assessments.” The new center will remain digitally connected to regional teams. Airbus will also invite airlines into the new Customer Care Center “which will help us better understand how they work and operate so that we can continuously improve our service.” Airlines have been closely involved in the new structure and according to Roewe are happy about the new format. Skywise now supports 140 airlines and over 9.500 aircraft Central to customer care and services at Airbus is the digital Skywise platform, which over the past four years has developed into an extensive support program for airlines and other users. It includes some 20.000 internal and external users worldwide and 140 airlines, which have a combined fleet of some 9.500 Airbus aircraft whose systems are continuously being monitored. Frontier Airlines has been announced as the latest airline to subscribe to the Skywise Health Monitoring program for its 111 A320-family aircraft. Predictive models based on fifteen million gigabytes of data gathered by Skywise so far will have airlines plan for maintenance, as it can be seen when parts are up for replacement or are about to fail. The so-called Digital Alliance between Airbus, Delta Airlines, and General Electric has resulted in analytical models being integrated into the Skywise platform to further increase knowledge on aircraft and engines. Delta will introduce predictive maintenance before the end of this year. Like all OEM’s, Airbus Services has been hit hard by the effects of the COVID-crisis and the massive grounding of airliners since March 2020. Revenues of the maintenance market dropped by some forty percent and some 66 percent of aircraft update programs were put on hold as airlines were forced to conserve all the cash they could. A pre-pandemic forecast that had MRO revenues grow from $156 to some $200 billion by 2025 is now outdated, said Roewe. Yet, “many airlines have used the downtime to put efficiency upgrades into their aircraft, like descent optimizer profiles. They have been a high-runner", said Roewe. For example, LATAM announced last month that they will retrofit some 200 A320s with the Descent Profile Optimizer software that saves fuel. On maintenance, many procedures and requirements have been reviewed to see if they are still necessary, resulting often in numerous changes. This way, the crisis has unleashed things that will have a lasting effect on the industry, said Klaus Roewe. Digitalization will further change aviation in the next five years Digitalization is a major one. Working digitally from home has cleared previous psychological barriers and speeded up digitalization that will benefit the whole society, not just aviation, said Head of Digital Solutions, Lionel Rouby. But he added: “Digitalization is a mean, not a purpose. The purpose is to transform a company to become more efficient. This is no more evident than in the aviation industry, which is one of the sectors that was hit the hardest by the crisis.” The need for agility and flexibility that has emerged from the COVID-crisis can be used through more digital solutions, which according to Airbus could save some $10 billion per year on inefficiencies coming from network disruptions, fuel costs, maintenance costs, and better inventory management. That’s a quarter of all costs associated with these four areas. Although Airbus has come a long way on digitalization since introducing the Digital Design, Manufacturing & Systems (DDMS) on the A350, the aviation industry at large is still progressing on the digital road, says Roewe: “It will look very, very different when we come to 2025.” Rouby adds: “Digitalization could lead to complete disruptions of the industry, including ourselves, and of some business models as we have seen in the past in other industrial sectors.”
