Execution in MRO: Aerospace and Defense’s Next Competitive Advantage
Sung Kim, Chief Technology Officer, iBase-t
Posted 7/7/2026
For aerospace and defense MRO organizations, demand has never looked stronger.
Commercial airlines are extending aircraft life cycles to meet surging passenger demand. Defense organizations around the world are increasing readiness requirements amid growing geopolitical uncertainty. OEMs, operators, and sustainment providers are all under pressure to keep critical assets available longer, perform maintenance faster, and maximize the return on every maintenance dollar spent.
Experts expect that the MRO market will expand from about $36 billion in 2025 to nearly $40 billion in 2026 in what’s being dubbed an extended maintenance “super cycle.” For MRO organizations, this should be a golden era.
Yet, in reality, many MRO leaders are struggling to execute fast enough to keep up with demand.
Aircrafts are staying in service longer. Fleet utilization continues to rise. Maintenance workloads are increasing. But at the same time, experienced technicians are retiring, assets are becoming more complex, and customers are demanding faster turnaround times and greater visibility into maintenance activities.
The challenge aerospace and defense (A&D) MRO organizations used to face was simply performing maintenance correctly. Now the challenge is performing maintenance predictably, efficiently, and at a scale that supports unprecedented operational demand.
The organizations that do not may find themselves struggling with growth backlogs, labor constraints, margin pressure, and customer dissatisfaction.
The New Competitive Battlefield: Maintenance Execution
When MRO leaders discuss modernization, conversations often focus on predictive maintenance, artificial intelligence, digital twins, or advanced analytics.
Those technologies are important. But they all depend on one foundational capability: execution.
Every maintenance action, inspection, repair, disposition, and signoff creates operational data. However, in many organizations, that information remains trapped in paper records, spreadsheets, disconnected systems, or the experience of individual technicians.
As a result, leaders often lack real-time visibility into:
- Work in progress
- Technical productivity
- Asset status
- Quality issues
- Part availability
- Scrapped parts
- Machine and smart-tool data collection
- Auto and low-touch operations
- Workflow bottlenecks
Without that visibility, even the most sophisticated technology initiatives struggle to deliver meaningful business value.
Simply put, organizations cannot optimize what they cannot see.
Why MRO Operations Must Move Beyond Reactive Maintenance
Most MRO organizations understand the frustration of operating in a reactive environment. Unexpected findings delay maintenance events. Parts arrive late. Work scopes expand. Schedules shift. Teams scramble to adjust.
The result is longer turnaround times, increased labor costs, reduced asset availability, and unnecessary operational risk. Digital execution changes that equation.
By capturing sustainment and MRO activities digitally and connecting people, processes, and systems in real time, organizations gain visibility into work as it happens. Supervisors can identify bottlenecks earlier. Planners can make better decisions. Technicians spend less time searching for information and more time performing value-added work.
This gives you more than just digitized paperwork. It gives you a more predictable maintenance operation. And predictability is one of the most valuable assets in modern MRO.
The Hidden Requirement for AI Success
Artificial intelligence has quickly become a boardroom priority across A&D. Executives want to leverage AI to improve readiness, reduce maintenance costs, accelerate troubleshooting, and optimize asset performance. But there is a fundamental challenge.
AI is only as effective as the data it can access. Many organizations are discovering that their greatest AI obstacle is the quality and availability of operational maintenance data. If maintenance activities are still documented manually, stored in disconnected systems, or inconsistently captured, AI initiatives will struggle to generate meaningful results.
When maintenance execution becomes digital, every inspection, repair, measurement, discrepancy, and corrective action can become part of a trusted operational data foundation. That foundation is what enables predictive analytics, intelligent decision support, digital twins, and AI-driven maintenance strategies.
In other words, digital execution is not separate from AI strategy. It is the prerequisite for your AI strategy.
Building the Foundation for the Digital Thread
The A&D industry has long pursued the vision of the Digital Thread, a connected flow of information throughout an asset’s lifecycle. For that vision to become reality, maintenance data must be included. The Digital Thread cannot stop at just capturing as-designed and as-built data. It must also capture as-maintained data – providing organizations with valuable data-driven insights as that asset goes through decades of sustainment, maintenance, repair, and overhaul.
Every maintenance event contributes valuable information about asset conditions, performance, reliability, and lifecycle cost. Organizations that capture and connect their information gain a significant advantage in improving readiness, extending asset life, reducing total ownership costs, and continuously improving maintenance performance.
The Opportunity Ahead for MRO Organizations
As the A&D MRO market enters this “super cycle” of sustained expansion, the organizations that succeed will not simply add more technicians or build larger facilities. They will create more intelligent operations.
By digitizing execution, organizations can increase productivity, improve asset availability, accelerate turnaround times, strengthen compliance, and create the operational data foundation required for future AI initiatives.
Most importantly, they can position themselves as strategic partners helping customers achieve their own readiness, performance, and digital transformation goals. The next phase of growth in A&D MRO will be driven by how effectively organizations execute. And increasingly, execution will be digital.
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