Air France Industries KLM Engineering & Maintenance (AFI KLM E&M) is the maintenance, repair and overhaul arm of Air France KLM, one of the top five airlines in the world. The MRO unit supports 1,500 airplanes operated by 150 airline customers, and its 300 facilities worldwide remove parts from those planes, repair or refurbish them, or provide scheduled maintenance. Tracking all of these parts posed a logistical challenge, but the company has deployed a radio frequency identification system to automate the process and cut costs.

There's been a great myth sweeping across the world of procurement. It's come about as procurement technology has grown widespread and companies are vying for customers to sign onto their solutions. The myth takes the form of an eraser, scrubbing away the lines between direct and indirect procurement.

When assessing areas of risk facing their departments, nearly half (45 percent) of chief procurement officers named supplier risk as a top concern, according to a survey by Consero Group, which creates invitation-only events for senior executives. The results were reported as part of the 2015 Global Procurement & Strategic Sourcing Data Survey.

Imagine if an enterprise in the United States was able to access vital product line information of a subsidiary plant in India or a crank shaft supplier being able to locate its component in an automobile across the globe or a machine being to self-assemble at the end destination. Technology advancements over the last decade have paved the way for all of the above situations to be executed in repeatable fashion.

Project-based operations that improved on-time and on-budget performance by 10 percent or more were nine times as likely to also improve dramatically on key financial metrics such as net profit margin and cost of compliance. Nearly every project-based manufacturer feels it is important for their company to improve on end-to-end project management, but less than half of the companies in project manufacturing, aerospace and defense (A&D) and maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) sectors with project-based operations make wide use of any recognized category of commercial software system. This includes limited use of enterprise resources planning and quality management (QMS) systems.

Lufthansa Technik and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico have announced an agreement to create an aviation maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) facility to service short-haul and medium-haul aircraft.