Global MRO demand hit $136 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach about $193 billion by the end of the decade, according to Oliver Wyman’s Global Fleet and MRO Market Forecast 2026-2036. The limiting factor isn’t work volume but how many hours of certified labor a shop can convert into billable output, as mechanic supply tightens and labor rates double their pre-pandemic pace. Most enterprise systems for repair stations and parts businesses are designed for straightforward transactions: one part out, one part back, one task, one invoice. However, aviation operates differently, with workarounds that consume administrative hours, reduce billable charges, and make export-control and recordkeeping accuracy depend on who inputs data that day. The operators who succeed will be those whose core systems handle exceptions as standard paths.
The super cycle has become a throughput question
Oliver Wyman’s Global Fleet and MRO Market Forecast 2026-2036 projects global MRO demand at $136 billion in 2025, an 8% rise from $126 billion in 2024, with spending nearing $193 billion by 2036. The global fleet is expected to grow 37% to about 41,000 aircraft. The forecast also shows the average fleet age increasing to 13.4 years from 12.1, due to OEM production shortfalls keeping older aircraft flying longer. These aircraft require more shop visits, component removals, and a wider range of parts. The demand remains steady; the challenge is labor.
Oliver Wyman’s MRO survey forecasts a shortfall of 17,800 certified mechanics in the US for 2025, rising to 22,000 by 2027. Average maintenance labor rates are expected to grow 5.5 to 6.0 percent annually, compared to pre-pandemic growth near 3 percent. Over 40 percent of surveyed companies reported increased labor attrition last year. The Aeronautical Repair Station Association’s assessment agrees: demand for skilled personnel could outstrip supply by over nine percent in the latter half of the decade if current trends continue.
This combination alters the purpose of an enterprise system. When a licensed technician costs six percent more annually and is harder to replace, every minute spent navigating menus, re-keying data, or creating placeholder records to get labor entries accepted is capacity used on tasks customers don’t pay for. Now, throughput per administrative hour is the key metric, largely determined by the system the shop runs on.
Exceptions to the norm are the norm
Tracing a unit through a component shop highlights the high exception density: intake, evaluation, costing, quoting, customer hold, parts hold, rework or outside vendor, final production, shipping. Only the middle steps are truly technical; the rest are transactional and where turnaround time is lost. Quotes delay because costing details are spread across three screens. Units stay in customer hold due to email-based approval trails instead of records. When an exchange arrives, either a core already in the shop or converting to a sale, the system lacks a path, forcing manual workarounds documented in shared folders by customer.
The cost appears in two areas: time and margin. Ambry Hill Technologies reports that customers often spend 50 to 70 percent of an enterprise-system user’s day navigating menus and modules without finding needed information. Although this is an internal vendor figure rather than an industry standard, it aligns with reports indicating that the administrative layer, not the wrench time, consumes the day. On the margin side, hazmat handling, crate building, freight, and inspection fees are small individually but significant collectively. These costs are frequently overlooked because they are incurred as parts hit the line and are often recorded in a generic bucket disconnected from specific part numbers.
This problem has a structural version within the shop: systems requiring a task on a work order before labor or bill-of-material items can be booked force teams to create placeholder tasks and administrative work orders for inspection, calibration, and rework time. These records distort actual versus standard hours, undermining the shop’s ability to benchmark technicians, price accurately, and forecast staffing. Without reliable labor data, shops cannot optimize turnaround times, and pricing defaults to history rather than true cost.
Compliance is a data-placement decision
Export-control and airworthiness records often go missing in routine processes. An ECCN listed only in a compliance spreadsheet, rather than on the transaction itself, remains unseen by those packing the crate. Ship-to company details typed at shipment bypass screening checks. When these fields are on the transaction form (visible to staff and printed) they ensure the record is accurate at the time of the action, not just before an audit.
Digital recordkeeping is the other half of the picture. FAA Advisory Circular 120-78B covers electronic signatures, electronic recordkeeping, and electronic manuals. Vista-Suite Enterprise provides FAA-compliant digital recordkeeping and signatures, reducing documentation time and enabling sign-off with a tap. For growing companies, this approach keeps compliance costs from rising linearly with volume.
Software fit is decided before go-live, not after
Enterprise software projects often fail due to operational fit rather than technology. Panorama Consulting Group’s 2026 ERP Report shows over a quarter of organizations exceeded budgets, mainly due to later-discovered gaps patched with extra tools, scope changes, and customizations. An independent analysis estimates about 30% of projects go over budget and 22.3% miss deadlines, with a median timeline of nearly nine months.
In aviation, misalignment is predictable because the requirements are specific and mostly non-negotiable: multiple core cost methods, core tracking, pool and lot handling, brokered repair, consignment and customer property with clear ownership, 8130-3 and ASA-100 document control, and labor recorded outside a work order. A generic platform can meet these needs through configuration and third-party add-ons, but this approach usually results in an extended implementation timeframe, a workaround catalog, and delays. A better approach is to prioritize product-operation fit, test against real shop exceptions rather than idealized demos, and interface accordingly.
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH VISTA-SUITE ENTERPRISE ERP AND MRO SOFTWARE, BY AMBRY HILL TECHNOLOGIES
Vista-Suite Enterprise ERP and MRO Software, by Ambry Hill Technologies is a cloud-native aviation enterprise platform built for parts traders, distributors, Part 145 repair stations, aircraft maintenance organizations, and teardown companies. It covers the full transaction set an aftermarket business runs on: inbound RFQs, quotes, sales orders, purchase orders, repair orders, work orders, invoicing, shipping and receiving, inventory, labor tracking, digital file management, dashboards, and mobile execution on iOS and Android. Exchange management is the area where the design intent is strong, with flat-rate and cost exchanges, multiple core cost methods, core tracking, pool part capability, multi-quantity lines, and the ability to override a system-generated returning core cost at the point of sale. Labor can be recorded independently against work orders, sales orders, stock lines, inventory pools, or general tasks, billable or non-billable, which removes the need to create a work order simply to capture time. Kanban views are available across transaction types rather than sales orders alone, and QR-based mobile functions recognize most legacy inventory barcodes, so warehouses do not have to relabel stock to go mobile.
The mapping to the pain points above: Part-related charges stay attached to the part number and appear in that part’s history instead of dissolving into a miscellaneous line. Export data such as ECCN, HTS, and country of origin remains available across the part master, receipt, shipment, invoice, and reporting views, with a Descartes VisualCompliance integration available for denied-party screening under a separate subscription. The platform supports digital recordkeeping under FAA AC 120-78B, and it can connect to an existing legacy dataset and surface that information inside its own screens as an alternative to a full data migration, which shortens the path to production for operators whose historical records are the main obstacle to changing systems. Ambry Hill Technologies is headquartered in Cambridge, Minnesota and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Air T, Inc.
The Aero NextGen take
The strategic point is narrow and worth stating plainly. In a market growing toward $193 billion in annual MRO spend with a widening certified-mechanic gap, competitive position is determined by how much billable output an operator extracts from the workforce it already has. Software that forces workarounds taxes that workforce twice: once in the hours spent navigating the exception, and again in the data quality lost when the exception is recorded as something it is not. Aviation-specific transaction design is not a preference. It is the difference between a system that captures the shop’s real economics and one that produces numbers finance has to reconstruct.
Aero NextGen maintains a documented library of 150+ operator pain points across ten categories, from admin burden on repairs and quote-approval delay to export-control exposure and labor-data integrity. The value is not in naming the problem. It is in mapping a specific one to a provider that has already solved it for a comparable operation, then supporting the implementation through Strategize, Optimize, and Digitize rather than handing over a shortlist and stepping back. For operators whose exception handling has become a manual process layered on top of the system of record, Vista-Suite Enterprise ERP and MRO Software, by Ambry Hill Technologies belongs on the evaluation list, tested against the transactions that break the current platform.
“Vista-Suite Enterprise is designed so a multi-core exchange, an ECCN, or a crate charge lives on the transaction itself rather than in a spreadsheet beside it. When the record is correct at the moment the work happens, the invoice and the audit both stop being separate projects.”
Eric Schech, Director of Marketing, Vista-Suite Enterprise ERP and MRO Software, by Ambry Hill Technologies
“Oliver Wyman puts the US certified-mechanic shortfall at 22,000 by 2027 while labor rates climb six percent a year, so the ERP decision is now a capacity decision. The systems that win the next five years are the ones that treat aviation’s exceptions as standard paths instead of billing operators for the workaround.”
Monica Badra, Founder & CEO, Aero NextGen
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Sources
Oliver Wyman, Global Fleet and MRO Market Forecast 2026-2036 (Feb 2026) – https://www.oliverwyman.com/our-expertise/insights/2026/feb/global-fleet-and-mro-market-forecast-2026-2036.html
Oliver Wyman, MRO supply chain shifts: labor, materials, and AI trends (Apr 2026) – https://www.oliverwyman.com/our-expertise/insights/2026/apr/aviation-mro-labor-and-material-supply-chain-paradigm.html
Oliver Wyman, Global Fleet and MRO Market Forecast 2025-2035 (fleet age 13.4 years) – https://www.oliverwyman.com/our-expertise/insights/2025/feb/global-fleet-and-mro-market-forecast-2025-2035.html
Consulting.us, coverage of Oliver Wyman MRO survey: mechanic shortfall and labor rate growth (May 2026) – https://www.consulting.us/news/13447/shortages-high-costs-loom-over-growing-aviation-maintenance-sector-oliver-wyman-survey
ARSA, Supply Chain Throttling Aerospace Maintenance Expansion (market assessment) – https://arsa.org/market-assessment/
Panorama Consulting Group, 2026 ERP Report release – https://www.panorama-consulting.com/panorama-consulting-group-releases-latest-study-of-erp-implementation-outcomes-across-the-globe/
Xorosoft, Manufacturing ERP Statistics 2026 (analysis of Panorama 2026 data) – https://xorosoft.com/manufacturing-erp-statistics/
Ambry Hill Technologies, Digital recordkeeping under FAA AC 120-78B using Vista-Suite Enterprise – https://ambryhill.com/blog/digital-recordkeeping-in-accordance-with-ac-120-78a-using-vista-suite-com-enterprise/
Ambry Hill Technologies, Vista-Suite Enterprise product page – https://ambryhill.com/vista-suite
Ambry Hill Technologies, Features (labor recording, exchange and credit handling) – https://ambryhill.com/features
Ambry Hill Technologies, The Real Test of Aviation ERP/MRO Software: Transaction Continuity – https://ambryhill.com/blog/the-real-test-of-aviation-erp-mro-software-transaction-continuity/
Ambry Hill Technologies, An Aviation-First ERP, Built by People Who’ve Run the Shop – https://ambryhill.com/blog/an-aviation-first-erp-built-by-people-whove-run-the-shop/
Aero NextGen, Vista-Suite vendor profile – https://www.aero-nextgen.com/vendors/vistasuite
