Procurement outsourcing for aviation and aerospace

No, and no procurement provider should. Whether a part is eligible for a given aircraft, whether an EASA Form 1 or FAA 8130-3 release is valid, and whether a vendor belongs on your approved supplier list are decisions for the organisation that holds the approval — your Part-145, Part-21 or CAMO responsibilities, not ours. Our work is administrative: raise the order against what your quality function has already approved, chase the certificate, check it is present and matches the part, and flag anything missing or inconsistent before it reaches your inspector.

Emergency AOG sourcing stays with the people who can act fastest — your own desk or your 24/7 provider. We are not going to pretend an outsourced team improves a three-in-the-morning phone call. What we change is what happens afterwards. Every AOG and expedited buy is logged, the part is re-sourced properly, added to the catalogue where it recurs and put under an agreed price, so the next occurrence is an order rather than a negotiation under pressure.

Out of scope, and we say so before access is discussed rather than after. Our analysts are in India and the Middle East and are not US persons, so ITAR-controlled technical data and defence articles are not work we will take. The same applies to EAR-controlled technical data where your licence does not extend to our jurisdiction. In practice we work the categories, systems and records that carry no controlled technical data, and your controlled work stays behind your own access controls.

We do, as administration. On each order we record which release document the part requires, chase the supplier for it, check it arrived with the shipment and matches the part and serial number ordered, and escalate a missing or inconsistent document before goods-in rather than after quarantine. Acceptance remains your inspector's call. The measurable change is how many parts reach receiving without their paperwork, which is a chasing problem rather than a judgement problem.

Yes. Repair orders, exchanges and loans are transactional in the same way a purchase order is: raise it, track the unit out and back, chase the shop for a quotation and a turnaround time, follow the core return so an exchange does not quietly convert into an outright purchase, and match the invoice to the scope that was actually approved. Which shop the unit goes to, and whether the quoted work is accepted, stay with your team.

The supplier and the buying decision are yours; the discipline underneath is ours. Acknowledgements chased and confirmed dates recorded rather than assumed, a live view of what is late against what the build or the check needs, and escalation raised when a date slips rather than when a line stops. We will not conjure capacity that does not exist — lead times on aerospace forgings and speciality alloys are set by the mills and the qualified conversion route, not by how often somebody calls.

It is what we recommend. One base, one shop or one category — consumables is usually the cleanest — gives a real measurement against a real baseline, and gives your team a working example to judge before anything wider is agreed.

Either a price per transaction — per purchase order, repair order or invoice — or a monthly fee for a dedicated analyst. Both models are on the table from the first call. We quote after the free audit, because the honest number depends on your volumes, your systems and how many transactions need exception work. Anyone quoting before seeing that is guessing.

Compare your fully loaded cost per purchase order, repair order or invoice against the quote. Fully loaded means salaries, benefits, overhead, software and the hours your buyers, planners and stores staff spend chasing. The free audit measures your current figure, so the comparison is your number against ours rather than a benchmark against a brochure.

We say up front rather than at renewal. Setup and process documentation sit inside the fixed-fee pilot. Ongoing fees cover the agreed scope and volume band. Anything outside it — a new entity, a new system, a large one-off backlog — is quoted separately before work starts.

Four to six weeks from first conversation to a team running live work. Roughly two weeks for the audit, then a fixed-fee pilot, then steady state. Your side of the work is a data extract, one named contact, scoped system access and your approval rules.

SAP, Oracle, IFS, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite and Infor, plus the aviation systems around them — AMOS, TRAX, Ramco, Quantum Control, Corridor and CAMP — and the parts marketplaces such as ILS and PartsBase. We work inside your system rather than asking your team to learn ours, so there is no migration and no new licence. Where you run more than one — usually after an acquisition — we work in each and map both to one classification for group reporting.

Access is scoped by you, granted to named individuals and revoked through your own leaver process. We contract on standard clauses, name every sub-processor, and work to GDPR, UK GDPR, PIPEDA, the Australian Privacy Principles and Saudi PDPL. ISO 27001 alignment is in progress and SOC 2 Type II is on the roadmap. We state certification status as it is rather than showing badges we do not hold.

Delivery is from India and the Middle East, and we say so plainly rather than burying it. Your data stays in your systems — we work inside them rather than copying data out. Where a copy is unavoidable, the storage region is written into the DPA, and we support UK IDTA and EU standard contractual clauses for transfers to India.

ISO 27001 or SOC 2 Type II, then two follow-up questions most providers dodge: which legal entity is certified, and what the audit scope actually covers. A badge on a website tells you nothing without those two answers. Ask us the same questions.

Duplicate detection runs before approval routing. Any change to a supplier's bank details is treated as an exception, never actioned by us, and escalated to your nominated contact for out-of-band verification. The analyst who maintains supplier master data is never the analyst who processes that supplier's invoices.

No. We prepare and route; you approve and release. Nobody on our side can move money or authorise a payment, and your delegation of authority stays exactly as it is.

Named analysts assigned to your account, with named backup cover for leave and absence. You know who does the work and who to call. Cover is a contractual term, not something you find out about when someone is on holiday.

Turnaround time, accuracy and exception-closure rates are agreed during the pilot against your measured baseline, then reported monthly. Remedies for a sustained miss are written into the contract rather than left to goodwill, and either side can exit on notice if the numbers do not hold.

Most clients redeploy them onto supplier development, long-lead programme buying and the cost-down work on repairs that never gets attention rather than cutting headcount. We will tell you honestly what your volume supports instead of promising a headcount number to win the work.

You keep the SOPs and process documentation, because they are yours throughout, and your data never leaves your systems. Transition-out support is written into the contract from day one rather than negotiated at the point you want to leave.

When almost everything you buy is an airworthy part against an approved vendor list, when your volumes are low enough that one experienced buyer covers them, or when the majority of your work is export-controlled. We will say so on the first call. A pilot that fails costs us more than a deal we decline.

Consumable, MRO and indirect spend by base and category; purchase, repair and exchange order volumes; AOG and expedite frequency; supplier count; cycle times; and how much of your buying sits outside a catalogue or an agreement. You get a written baseline you keep whether or not you go further, and it is the number every later comparison is made against — including ours.