Liebherr-Aerospace: Eco-responsibility in MRO means performance

The whole Customer Service network of Liebherr-Aerospace is working on a long-term sustainability approach all along its products lifecycle, and goes even beyond official regulations to meet the business and industrial performance, through new projects and innovative solutions.

Repairable and recyclable products

As an OEM highly involved in the maintenance of its products, Liebherr-Aerospace designs its products to be repairable and recyclable: these criteria are taken into account from the first phases of development. In order to minimize “scrap and replace”, all equipment are provided with associated documentation to perform OE approved maintenance and repairs. Moreover, the Liebherr teams are regularly developing salvage repairs solutions for piece parts through their Design Organization Approval (DOA) agreement. Solutions such as upgrades and modifications enable to extend on-wing life, to manage obsolescence, to optimize repairs and to reduce noise emissions and consumption while enhancing flight performances.

The next major challenge for air transport will be to deal with intensive maintenance or high fuel consumption of aircraft coming to their end-of-life. To meet that challenge, the aircraft will be dismantled and still useable products will be induced into recycling: various Liebherr equipment will be extracted and repaired as needed to feed inventories and pools such as “USM by Liebherr” (Used Serviceable Materials).

Green industrial processes

As its ISO 14001 certification attests, Liebherr-Aerospace is committed to reduce its environment impact, and to manage closely its environmental risks, may they be related to pollution, emissions or to dangerous products handling. The Customer Services teams are constantly working on optimizing the consumption of energy and raw materials, on improving industrial procedures, as well as on the reduction and treatment of wastes. An appropriate worldwide network of Liebherr’s own repair stations and MRO licensees offers local services and avoids unnecessary transits while shortening turnaround-times. All these actions and requirements are shared with Liebherr’s worldwide supply chain.

In order to accelerate the process, a project team has been embedded in the Liebherr-Aerospace Customer Service network. Its objective is to develop a specific strategy in combination with implementing European REACh-compliant procedures in the network. That implies that Liebherr-Aerospace will go even further than the official regulation by deploying and implementing sustainable processes for the repair and the maintenance of its products in its network worldwide.

Digital transformation

In parallel, the current digital transformation of the maintenance, repair and overhaul activity contributes also to changes in the environmental performance of Liebherr-Aerospace’s Customer Services. The traditional documentation for example is now paperless; a remarkable change, considering the volumes of manuals that are required to operate and repair aeronautical systems. Nowadays, in order to avoid printing and shipping, 450,000 pages of 3,000 documents are made available digitally for the customers within the Liebherr-Aerospace network.

Furthermore, “Liebherr-Aerospace is deploying health management services that help our customers to optimize the localization and to adjust the dimensioning of the inventories. In parallel, our teams are working on state-of-the-art Digital Smart MRO solutions enabling to generate more value while consuming fewer resources due to leaner direct processes,” explains Sven Dicke, VP MRO Operation & Strategic Investment at Liebherr-Aerospace & Transportation SAS.

All these initiatives of Liebherr-Aerospace combine performance with eco-responsibility, because they shorten turnaround time and lead to longer on-wing life, as well as reuse of existing equipment.