How Custom Dashboards Improve Inventory Visibility

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Excessive ERP action messages, extended work hours, delivery delays, and customer dissatisfaction. These are headaches that go hand in hand with inventory management in aviation, where one manufacturer alone can move billions of dollars in parts each year.

With millions of parts and components needed, inventory visibility is a major logistical hurdle in inventory management. Streamlining these processes is no small feat, yet custom dashboards powered by AI technology improve visibilitiy and aid  decision making by offering real-time insights and actionable recommendations. With the right tools, inventory management can shift from a reactive burden to a proactive competitive edge.

What is inventory visibility?

Inventory visibility refers to a company's ability to accurately monitor its stock, tracking status, quantity, condition, and location. Such visibility is especially challenging in aviation given the complexity and critical nature of aircraft parts and components. 

Real-time insights are needed throughout the entire supply chain, including warehouses, distribution centers, and air hangars, to ensure timely replenishment and optimal procurement schedules and stock levels.

Achieving inventory visibility in aerospace

Aerospace inventory management operates on a scale and complexity that far exceeds most other industries, yet achieving full inventory visibility is key for operational resilience. 

Here are some of the key challenges faced: 

High complexity

The typical commercial aircraft contains millions of individual parts, each with its own lifecycle, maintenance requirements, replacement schedule, and sourcing challenges.

Even one small part, such as a missing bolt, can become a major logistic headache. It can set off a cascade of delays and operational bottlenecks, even leading to AOG (Aircraft on Ground) events,‌ which cost carriers millions of dollars per year in lost revenue and customer trust.

High inventory churn rate

With so many parts and components at play, aviation inventory is highly dynamic. Inventory is constantly moving, being shuffled across a network of warehouses, maintenance facilities, and operational sites to satisfy MRO requirements. This can make it difficult for inventory teams to pinpoint critical items when they are needed most.

Global supply chains

Manufacturing and maintaining modern aircraft is, quite literally, a worldwide effort. Companies depend upon vast international supply chains, sourcing goods from multiple countries. Across geopolitical borders, coordinating the flow of highly regulated goods is a monumental task.

Additionally, businesses must contend with events outside of their control, such as customs processing delays, severe weather, or geopolitical disruptions.

A single delay at one supplier's facility in Asia can cause ripples throughout the global network, halting assembly lines, delivery schedules, and cargo and passenger flights on every continent around the world.

While there will always be “uncontrollables” in any supply chain, businesses with full inventory visibility can mitigate these every-day realities for greater resilience.

Stringent regulations

Aerospace is one of the most highly regulated industries anywhere in the globe. Aircraft operators must meet the compliance requirements of domestic and international authorities like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), and the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA).

Each of these governing bodies mandates meticulous tracking and reporting of parts usage, movement, condition, and certification status. Failure to meet any of these requirements can result in sizable fines or the grounding of aircraft.

Without centralized inventory visibility, meeting these wide-ranging regulatory standards is a tedious task, prone to lapses in oversight and human error.

Limited integration of systems

Aerospace companies commonly use fragmented systems to manage processes for inventory, procurement, maintenance, and finance. When departments use different software, data becomes siloed and delayed. This makes it difficult to obtain one objective, unified view of all the inventory at play.

Disparate systems drive up costs, as they can lead to inconsistent stock levels (with shortages and overstock more common), duplicate orders, and missed replenishment alerts (NetSuite).

The human factor

To err is human, and with manual human processes, errors are inevitable. 

Inaccurate stock counts can lead to stockouts or overstocking. The latter ties up capital in stale goods (due to manufacturing expiration dates or obsolescence), and can incur further charges for insurance, storage, maintenance, and waste removal fees.

Additionally, delays in updating inventory records can turn decision-makers into speculators as they must rely on outdated information and gut instincts.

With manual, human processes at play, intervention response is much slower to urgent issues such as manufacturer recalls or AOG events.

How custom dashboards transform inventory visibility

Custom inventory dashboards are transforming aerospace operations through unprecedented levels of insight and efficiency. Businesses can consolidate data using real-time tracking solutions (such as RFID or IoT devices) to create actionable, to-the-minute insights.

Complete and accurate data at your fingertips in seconds can bring near-surgical precision to inventory management.

Real-time tracking

Custom dashboards centralize data from multiple sources, such as ERP systems, warehouse management (WM) tools, and other supply chain management (SCM) software for a live view of inventory levels, location, transport, and storage conditions.

Spirit Aero launched a real-time supply chain visibility system, dubbed the "control tower" to improve warehouse operations and reduce parts shortages. This setup provides real-time updates (manufacturing and dispatch) on parts and subassemblies (pre-assembled parts or components), replacing manual status checks with automated monitoring.

The control tower targets its top 60 to 70 suppliers, which represent 80% of the supply chain value with other providers being added in to eventually cover its full network of 600 (Aviation Week Network).

Alan Young, Spirit's chief procurement officer, stresses the benefits of digital real-time tracking for "early identification of constraints" and the ability to "transform customer-supplier relationships."

Proactive decision-making with predictive analytics

Inventory dashboards equipped with AI capabilities enable predictive decision-making rather than relying on reactive monitoring. Through a continual analysis of historical data, market trends, and current demand, companies can better predict inventory needs and optimize stock levels.

The volume and immediacy of data deliver more accurate demand forecasting for a competitive leg up. 

Enhanced collaboration

Across many organizations, data exists in separate silos, with each business unit using its own software and workflow processes to track inventory. Custom dashboards do more than merge and validate ‌data. They also capture data at the source and then display it to all business units for a single source of real-time inventory visibility.

All stakeholders, from procurement teams to maintenance crews, share the same unified view. Role-based access ensures users get the most relevant insights into their job duties, so they take away actionable tasks and recommendations instead of getting lost in the relentless flood of data.

Overall communication and decision-making can improve among cross-functional teams, with everyone working in sync to meet customer expectations and improve process efficiencies.

ePlaneAI's custom dashboards for inventory visibility exemplify these capabilities. A company's existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) software can be integrated with ePlaneAI’s Aviation AI platform for enhanced collaboration and visibility.

Improved regulatory compliance

Custom dashboards reduce the administrative burden of dealing with FAA, DOT, EASA, and other regulations. Aviation companies can untangle and simplify compliance through the consolidation of all required guidelines and documentation into one easily accessible hub, 

Automated alerts can flag discrepancies, lapses in certification, missing audit logs, or maintenance events, ensuring that fleets and fleet records are always audit-ready.

Advanced visualization

Endless rows of raw data aren't useful to teams. Even single-source, raw data can lead to poor visibility if it's not presented visually through heatmaps, charts, and graphs.

These intuitive formats help teams quickly identify trends so they can more effectively monitor stock levels and forecast growth.

Companies that have implemented real-time inventory visibility solutions (RTIVS) have seen stock level accuracy above 99% and were able  to reduce inventory picking and fulfillment time by more than 70%.

A U.S.-based carrier implementing RTIVS has seen a 16% decrease in inventory (stored in warehouses and fulfillment centers) and a 20% improvement in on-time delivery rates.

Cost reduction

Through increased inventory visibility, companies can eliminate the waste associated with inaccurate inventory stock levels and future demand forecasting. This includes purchasing less excess inventory, reducing storage and warehousing fees, and removing MRO and insurance costs associated with holding surplus goods.

Research from McKinsey highlights that companies leveraging AI for real-time inventory management have achieved a virtuous cycle of impressive results, including the following cost savings:

• 5% to 10% reduced warehousing costs
• 25% to 40% reduced administration costs
• 10% to 15% overall cost reductions for purchasing and maintaining inventory

Improved visibility can also reduce shipping costs, stale inventory (by improving inventory turnover times), and lost sales due to inaccurate stock counts.

In all of these cases where AI is automating inventory management, the ROI is fast and furious… 10x-100x ROI within months of deployment seems to be quite the norm with AI.

Aviation-specific concerns for inventory dashboards

Aviation companies face unique challenges that require meticulous planning and performance. After nuclear energy and pharmaceuticals, the aerospace industry arguably holds the world's strictest inventory oversight protocols.

Here's why:

Precision and quality in production and management 

The aerospace industry relies on flawless inventory management because defective or missing parts can lead to system failures and endanger lives. Doors falling off aircraft in mid-flight is not supposed to happen, and while it has been sensationalized, such incidents are exceptionally rare. 

This means every component must be tracked and documented, often with stringent quality control standards enforced by regulatory agencies like the FAA, EASA, and ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization).

Lifecycle management is critical. Aviation parts have strict lifespans and maintenance intervals. Dashboards must track these cycles precisely to ensure parts are replaced or serviced before expiration, avoiding safety risks and compliance issues.

AI is really good at making sense of unstructured data in the myriad of certificates and other compliance paperwork associated with different parts, and “tracking” data across systems.

Global compliance and safety standards

Beyond traceability, aviation companies must navigate a web of other international regulatory standards that include export controls, airworthiness certifications, audit records, and hazardous material handling. Inventory dashboards help centralize these compliance requirements.

For critical components, redundancy requirements are common. Here, companies must keep backup stock on hand to ensure continuous operation. Dashboards can optimize inventory redundancy without tying up excess capital in unnecessary spare parts.

Adding to these MRO challenges, companies must have excellent counterfeit detection processes. The aerospace industry faces risks from counterfeit or uncertified parts entering the supply chain. Dashboards equipped with authentication and certification tracking help mitigate these risks.

Real-time response and operational agility

Delayed flights represent some of the most costly and urgent challenges in aviation. It takes just one missing part to lead to lost revenue and frustrated customers. Inventory dashboards are equipped with real-time tracking capabilities to flag critical needs as they arise, allowing teams to address urgent situations before they turn into emergencies. 

Aviation logistics are equally complex, with inventory spanning manufacturing sites, maintenance hubs, and distribution centers across the globe. Dashboards facilitate coordination across these nodes for efficient stock allocation and movement.

Maximizing efficiency for high-value inventory

Aviation parts are not only expensive but require precise management for maximum reliability. Dashboards enable pinpoint accuracy in tracking goods, helping teams avoid misallocations, delays, or overstocking. Fleet-specific tracking capabilities allow operators to manage precise maintenance schedules for each individual aircraft part, keeping the entire fleet mission-ready.

ePlaneAI elevates inventory visibility

Aviation demands more than just inventory management—it requires precision, compliance, and real-time solutions to meet some of the world's toughest oversight protocols.

That's why ePlaneAI provides a unified platform to transform your inventory data into a Herculean powerhouse of compliance and real-time visibility throughout your entire supply chain. From tracking how many units are in stock to making accurate trend projections, ePlane AI dashboards turn complexity into clarity.

With ePlaneAI, aviation teams have the tools they need to navigate industry challenges with greater security, precision, and confidence.

Automated inventory management dashboards can revolutionize business

An effective inventory management system has become essential for those operating in the aviation space. With millions of moving parts and a global supply chain, achieving full visibility improves operational resilience and simplifies regulatory compliance. ePlaneAI helps businesses deploy AI to realize the untapped power of real-time data to slash costs, minimize delays, and elevate customer satisfaction.

Take the next step: Discover how ePlaneAI’s cutting-edge automated inventory solutions and custom dashboards can elevate your inventory visibility and streamline your operations. 

Contact us today to learn more and schedule a demo tailored to your specific needs.