Founded in 2011, FTAI Aviation is the aviation leasing arm of Fortress Transportation and Infrastructure Investors LLC (NYSE: FTAI), a publicly traded company that owns and acquires high-quality jet engines and commercial aircraft. FTAI offers a wide range of services to airlines, MRO, and lessor customers worldwide, including aircraft and engine leasing, engine module and maintenance services, and part-out services, and excels at structuring bespoke leases that meet operational and economic requirements.
From offices in New York, Miami, London, Dublin, and Dubai, FTAI manages roughly $2.5 billion in assets across 224 engines and 113 aircraft, working with 70 operators in 42 countries. Its partnership with a major North American-based MRO ensures its high-value assets stay well maintained and serviceable.
The challenge
Disconnected systems slowing down two critical relationships.
As engines approach their lease expiry, the FTAI team works with MRO partners to perform engine shop visits and re-certify them before delivery to the next customer. Historically, FTAI managed this complex process, like many lessors, using Excel spreadsheets and email. The parallel, back-and-forth communication and the inability to track projected versus actual timelines across spreadsheets made the process cumbersome and caused notorious maintenance and repair delays.
Given its growth ambitions, FTAI had the vision to automate the management and oversight of shop visits and streamline the information flow to track workscopes, resulting in better predictability around timelines and costs while saving millions of dollars in the process.
We needed to automate this complicated engine shop visit process to reduce downtime on our engines and avoid unnecessary costs and we needed a way to collaborate directly with the MRO by capturing all the tasks, timelines and communications related to a shop visit in a centralized place.
— Julie Malabossa, Director of Operations, FTAI Module Factory Program
At the same time, FTAI wanted to differentiate itself in a competitive industry by giving customers a technology-centric way to access time-sensitive information at any time, especially as airlines shifted focus after COVID toward finding engines that would help them defer costly shop visits rather than lease new aircraft.
We were looking to provide unparalleled convenience and efficiency to our customer base. We found that in the LeaseWorks portal.
— David Moreno, COO, FTAI Aviation
The solution
One platform, extended to every stakeholder.
FTAI found the answer to both challenges in the same platform, just extended to two different audiences.
Streamlining Engine Shop Visits with MRO Partners
FTAI was already using LeaseWorks CRM for internal contact and deal management, along with LeaseWorks Asset to coordinate tasks with airline customers. “The open and collaborative nature of that implementation and the continued support they received from the LeaseWorks team led FTAI to extend the technology to another set of key stakeholders, its MRO partners,” said Angela Balzano, Product Manager. LeaseWorks extended Asset to give FTAI a shop visit management solution, enabling the company to collaborate directly with its MRO partners in one centralized location.
Both companies’ teams get full visibility into project progress, delays, and all communications tied to a shop visit, can log in for real-time information, share updates, track progress, and categorize delays, and FTAI can visualize recurring issues by engine type, module, or other factors. Reports and dashboards give the Technical team and management visibility into engine status, costs, timelines, and potential delays.
Bringing Real-Time Self-Service to Airline Customers
FTAI also uses Asset to give customers the ability to search real-time asset inventory to streamline fleet planning, file utilization electronically to cut invoice turnaround times, view centralized invoice aging for transparency around payment delays, and access individual asset profiles, including shop visit information and maintenance reserve fund allocations.
The result
Efficiency and transparency across the value chain.
That shift shows up differently for each of FTAI’s audiences. MRO partners now work from the same shop visit data as FTAI’s own team instead of trading spreadsheets and emails back and forth, which is exactly the change that let FTAI start closing in on the predictability, and the savings, it set out to find.
The LeaseWorks MRO collaboration product has made shop visit management efficient and transparent by streamlining communication with our MRO partners.
— David Moreno, COO, FTAI Aviation
On the customer side, that same real-time access changed how FTAI’s airline customers plan their fleets and manage invoicing, without waiting on a phone call or an email chain.
We can now let airlines find information on their terms… what they need, whenever they need it.
— David Moreno, COO, FTAI Aviation
Two different relationships, one platform, and for FTAI, exactly the kind of predictability and cost savings it set out to find when engine shop visits were still running through spreadsheets.
At LeaseWorks, our mission is to help lessors embrace the digital world and help them become nimble by spending less time chasing information and more time making decisions. We work closely with our customers to understand problems and deliver timely digital solutions to increase efficiency, reduce costs and accelerate their digital transformation initiatives.
— Haseem Vazhayil, Former CEO, LeaseWorks
$2.5B
Assets under management
224
Engines in the portfolio
70
Operators across 42 countries
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