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Greg Colgan, MRO Holdings CEO
MRO Holdings CEO Greg Colgan sat down with Inside MRO’s Lee Ann Shay to talk about the company’s priorities and investments for this year, as well as capability expansions.
How many maintenance labor hours is MRO Holdings producing? For 2024, we’re tracking north of 10 million labor hours—probably 10.3 million or 10.5 million. For a while, we were pretty aggressive about building hangars, but recently the capacity we added was with throughput. The aircraft we’re seeing are just big, heavier checks. They’re 26-28-year-old aircraft. Post-COVID-19, 2021 was a mad scramble, but it was a good year. In 2022, it was a little bit of a punch in the face, getting caught off guard to get aircraft reactivated after being parked in the desert. Delivery delays from both airframe OEMs compounded that.
Airlines are always resilient, but I think there’s more discipline in the industry now than ever. That starts with the network and maintenance teams. The reality is we had aircraft sticking around for 70-90 days because of special findings, a lot of which was corrosion-driven. So in 2023, it was about regaining our balance and really digging into the checks to find the seven or eight things that were tripping us up, so we could hit those early. Our focus this year as we get above that 10-million-hr. mark, which is almost exclusively airframe, is to stay very focused and disciplined around the operation and on the financial side.
Investing $1 into throughput right now almost flows straight to the bottom line. It’s the one shared metric between the airlines and ourselves. We’ve let our customers know our focus this year is on people and systems.
On the people side, does that mean more training? Any new systems? On the people side, we got really busy after COVID and probably lost a bit of focus on employee engagement as the industry struggled with the recovery. In 2023, we started to shift gears and asked whether we were putting our people in a position to win. We’re not putting people on the Moon. This is about information, parts, tooling and the flow of the aircraft. Details matter. We’re generating a massive amount of data from our network, and we’re only scratching the surface of these Airbus and Boeing aircraft, especially as they get older.
That’s where the systems piece comes in. Are we really implementing systems so we’re getting the desired results? The finish line isn’t deploying a system—it’s maintaining quality, safety and compliance, but getting better throughput. There’s a ton of opportunity there. There’s a lot of shiny objects that come across my desk, including acquisitions—and we do have a list of what we’re interested in—but when it really comes down to it, we’re going to protect our operational performance and credibility.
What particular systems are you looking at? We decided to go with the SAP S/4HANA Finance suite, and we’ll complement that with SAP SuccessFactors. We also recently implemented Ariba and Concur as part of that suite. With the size of the operation and the complexities of managing four or more locations, we’re moving to a common system across it.
When will you finish implementing it all? We’ll do it facility by facility, but realistically, that will carry into 2026.
What about adding new capabilities or acquiring other MROs to gain capabilities and capacity? We’re focused on organic growth aligned with our customers’ fleet growth. There’s still a ton of demand out there. As an airframe MRO, we’re in a unique position, at least in the past couple of decades, because we’re almost buyers. Airlines come to us and say, “We could do this and this.” But from our standpoint, we want to focus on consistent check packages—nose-to-tail lines. Here in the U.S., we’re all trying to optimize the operation to the labor available. We’d love to be running a larger footprint—it’s not a “build hangar” capacity question. It’s recruiting and retaining labor. We have really looked at our employee value proposition, including compensation. We want people to feel stable and secure—and part of the family.
What capabilities are customers requesting? We added Boeing 777 maintenance in El Salvador [with Aeroman] last year, which has been a huge success for us. The team did a fantastic job preparing for that work. The two lines of 777s are very stable. The Airbus A220 is definitely interesting to us, as is the Boeing 787. We’re not doing any Airbus A330s right now, but I think we might reintroduce it in 2025 or 2026.
Aeroman has grown so much over the past two decades. Any plans for further expansion? Aeroman is just short of 50 lines of maintenance. We could probably do another three hangars. We will expand, but we tapped the brakes to really dial into our operational performance and efficiencies. We’re good at managing our productivity per square meter, which is a metric that is very important to us. I’d argue we’re one of the best in the world and have taken advantage of the space we have.
What keeps you up at night? Beyond the financial discipline, it’s about aligning our key performance indicators with our customers’, which means focusing on fleet availability. I keep talking about throughput, but it’s so important. Airlines need those aircraft. There’s more focus than ever on making sure we get them in and out.
How do you ensure supply chain problems don’t impact on-time deliveries? We’ve invested in our supply chain team the last two years, and that team is doing a great job protecting almost 100 lines of maintenance. A very small percentage of our delays are due to parts. We’ve deployed a lot of capital to protect our supply chain. We moved supply chain into the operations team—they were separated before—so now they’re aligned on the pre-plan. We’re hyperfocused on labor and parts before an aircraft shows up, to the point I can tell you how many sheet metal mechanics we need the next day. We forecast our labor by task card, by skill set, by location and by line 12 months out.
Airlines have been more willing to sign longer-term base maintenance contracts. Have your contracts lengthened? We don’t entertain anything less than five years. Five years for me is the starting point from which we deploy capital. There’s good and bad that come with these long-term relationships. Our exposure within the airline is at a very, very high level because we are critical to their operation. That comes with the responsibility to make sure we’re operating at that level. So when we say safety, quality, compliance and turnaround times at any cost, there are going to be times when you have to spend to get through a challenge. That’s where the partnership comes in. It’s getting away from that transaction that gets us through a challenge versus “how do we never see this again.”
