From Jet Engines to Runways: Airport Maintenance Management at MAG

Airport maintenance management is one of the most demanding jobs in the asset world. A failed baggage belt, security lane or jet bridge has passengers and cargo waiting behind it, and at a 24/7 cargo hub the runway does not close for repairs.

James Ayre is Asset Management Director at Manchester Airports Group (MAG), the UK’s largest UK-owned airports group, which operates Manchester, London Stansted and East Midlands. He is based at East Midlands Airport, the UK’s largest dedicated cargo hub. Before aviation, he spent almost 20 years at Rolls-Royce, rising from engineering apprentice to the company’s global maintenance executive.

In this episode of the Comparesoft Maintenance Management Podcast, James explains how he runs airport maintenance management across a group of over 220,000 assets, why culture has to change before technology, and how data now decides when a runway gets dug up.

From Testing Jet Engines at Rolls-Royce to Maintaining an Airport

James did not plan a career in maintenance. It grew out of testing gas turbine engines and asking what makes them fail.

“Testing gas turbine engines really sparked an interest in why things fail and how they fail,” he says. “Effectively every engine needs to be tested to destruction so we can understand when it failed, how it failed, and the trigger points.”

That curiosity pulled him from manufacturing into maintenance, where the mindset is very different. “Manufacturing is very well written down, which steps you take to get to the end product,” he explains. “Flip that into maintenance, and you need your own initiative. The operational manuals are very broad. They do not tell you, if you have this failure mode, this is what you go and do.”

The move to an airport also changed what runs through the machine. “At Rolls-Royce there was a physical product going through those assets. Here, the product is people,” James says. “It is a similar endgame, you want to get a certain number of people through a machine, but the difference is the variety of that passenger mix.”

“Like a Small Town”: What Airport Maintenance Management Looks Like at MAG

Airport maintenance management at MAG covers an estate closer to a small town than a single building. James manages “a portfolio across the group of over £5.3 billion, over 220,000 different assets,” and the variety is what makes it hard. “If you look across an airport, it is almost like a small town,” he says. That estate spans:

• High voltage (HV) electrical networks
• A water network that captures and treats water coming off the airfield
• A full fleet of vehicles across the site
• Air navigation and security systems
• Runways and airfields, right the way through to drains and toilets

Running maintenance across that base is not one job but several, layered on top of each other. Understanding how MAG structures those layers is what makes its use of a maintenance system make sense.

A Four-Group Structure Built Around Asset Stewards

MAG runs maintenance through four asset groups, one each at Manchester, Stansted and East Midlands, plus a central group team. Within those groups sit two distinct roles. Asset stewards own the long view, and maintenance teams keep the assets running day to day.

“An asset steward looks across the whole asset lifecycle,” James says. “They are trying to understand the right asset to procure and the total cost of ownership, not just the best procurement deal you can get, right the way through to disposal and true asset life, when it is going to need to be retired.”

Below them, the maintenance teams focus on optimisation. “Through the lifecycle of the asset, it is all about optimising that asset,” he explains. “From introduction to the operation, making sure we have got the right optimised asset plan, knowing what the critical failures and critical components might be, and making sure we have got the right service contracts in place.” That includes a deliberate balance between work done in house and work bought in, what James calls the “do buy split,” which he considers healthy at MAG today.

Managing the Whole Asset Lifecycle, Not Just the Purchase

The steward model exists because the highest costs in airport maintenance management arrive long after the purchase order. James wants decisions driven by whole-life data, not the upfront price.

“Right the way through to end of life, we feed that data forward, so our data-driven capital expenditure (CAPEX) plans explain when your remaining useful life triggers,” he says. He is just as blunt about the repair-or-replace call. “You have got to get into those numbers. If you are spending £6,000 or £7,000 on a £3,000 asset, it does not make sense.”

In practice, a steward at MAG is thinking about each asset across its whole life:

• Procurement, judged on total cost of ownership rather than the best headline deal
• An optimised asset plan at introduction, mapping the critical failures and components
• The right service contracts, and a healthy in-house versus outsourced split
• Condition and criticality, updated every time the asset is maintained
• Remaining useful life, feeding data-driven CAPEX planning
• A clear repair or replace decision based on the numbers
• Disposal and true asset life

Maximo as the Single Source of Truth

All of that depends on one trusted record. A Computerised Maintenance Management System (CMMS), the software a maintenance team uses to record assets, plan work and store history, sits at the centre, and MAG runs IBM Maximo as its Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) platform, the wider system that manages assets across their whole life.

“Our fundamental core database is Maximo,” James says. “We load our inventory stock into that, so I get total cost of asset maintenance in there.” From there the data drives decisions about disruption, not just repairs. “We are really trying to understand that disruption matrix and the cost of disruption, whether that is reputational or financial,” he explains. The team uses Power BI to model that data, and is taking its first steps with AI to interrogate it further.

This is why, for any team starting out, choosing the right CMMS software matters so much. The system becomes the foundation the entire operating model sits on, so it has to hold cost, condition, criticality and spares in one place you can trust.

Matching the Maintenance Strategy to Each Asset

A single estate does not get a single maintenance approach. A large part of airport maintenance management is deciding, asset by asset, what the right strategy actually is.

“Some of them may be run to fail, and that is fine, that is a good structure for certain asset groups,” James says. “But others are condition monitoring because they are critical. So it is defining that right process, and if you are working in an enterprise or a group, make sure you have set that out across your group so you can return on your investment across the enterprise, not just at individual factory level.”

The priority is always the assets that reach the passenger. James wants his team to “focus on the right assets, the critical assets that are going to impact the customers going through our airport.” Regulation can override the plan entirely, which is why the register and the maintenance strategy have to stay live. “Many of our security lanes have recently been changed, not because they were end of life, but because the regulation had changed and we needed 3D X-ray,” he says.

Sharing Assets, Data and Expertise Across the Group

The scale of MAG turns into an advantage when its three airports work as one enterprise rather than three sites. James sees value in sharing assets, data and knowledge.

“It could be sharing assets, it could be sharing data from the asset,” he says. “If Stansted have got a leading machine, when did it fail? When did we do the services? What did we find? Sharing that across the teams is so powerful.” That only works when every site records the same things in the same system, which is what turns a CMMS from a local logbook into a group-wide asset.

Holding it together is a network of specialists. “We have subject matter experts and communities of practice,” James explains. “We will have a baggage specialist who understands the baggage machines across the airports, and helps us think strategically about the right asset to procure for the next 15 years.” Shared knowledge shortens decisions. “If we have a machine that has challenges with bearings or slip rings, is there a machine out there today that does not have that fault anymore? Absolutely, there is.”

Every one of these decisions, from a repair-or-replace call to a group-wide procurement, is only as good as the data and the culture behind it. That is where MAG focused next.

Getting Your CMMS and Asset Management Data Right

James is blunt about what a maintenance system does to a weak operation. It does not rescue it. It exposes it.

“A CMMS will amplify any problems or process issues you already have,” he says. “If you have got poor data and you buy the best CMMS you can get your hands on, it will amplify the issue. You have to fix your core fundamentals first.”

MAG learned that the hard way. The platform was modern but the data was not, so the stewardship programme spent around two years cleaning it. “We stripped out 40% of redundant or old assets that were noise in the system,” he says. Some records were simply copied and pasted from other sites, so the register listed terminals and runways that East Midlands does not have.

The fix was better uploads plus physical verification, now supported by QR-coded asset tags. “It is important to upload your data correctly first, but just as important to walk the site and touch the assets, make sure they are there,” James says. Friction quietly destroys that data. “If you do not make it seamless, people stop raising faults because it is too difficult, and then you are missing all that information about mean time between failure.”

He is just as firm on discipline inside the system. “A bugbear of mine is somebody reporting the problem cause remedy codes as default,” he says. “I want to ban default, because it does not tell me what happened or why.” The deeper lesson is that a system is only as good as the culture using it, which is why James is blunt about the real danger: “the biggest risk you have is buying the right system that nobody will use.”

What to Get Right Before You Buy a CMMS

For a first-time buyer, James is clear that software is the last problem to solve, not the first. He reduces it to three priorities. “Clean your data first,” he says. “Ensure engagement with the end user, almost become subservient to them, knowing what they want and how they want it done. And invest as much money in change as you are investing in technology.”

That last point is where he sees most projects fail. “A CMMS is as much of a business change programme as it is an IT programme,” James says. “That is where a lot of companies get it wrong. They think about an IT tool, chuck it over the fence and go get on with it. It is not that at all.”

Building the Airport Maintenance Culture Behind Proactive Maintenance

The biggest change at MAG has not been a piece of kit. It has been a mindset. “The big change is the cultural shift, from maintaining the asset when it failed to a proactive space,” James says. “We use all of the kit coming at us to help predict a failure, and the whole purpose is to have zero impact on our passengers.”

At East Midlands, that ambition carries extra weight, because the airport never stops. “Our runway does not shut, so we have to be even more on it, trying to track down defects before they become a defect,” he says. “Safety is absolutely at the top of everything we do.”

A proactive operation needs people who are free to look ahead, not just react. One of James’s first moves was to create a dedicated reliability function.

“The implementation of reliability engineering, or lifecycle engineering, is fundamentally key to shift you into a proactive state,” he says. “If you have only got a reactive team, you will never lift your head up high enough to look at the data, because you are on to fixing the next job.”

He also uses outsourced facilities management (FM), the contracted delivery of hard services like building systems and soft services like cleaning, and treats it as a partnership. “It is a partnership, not a supply contract,” James says. “If my FM team fail, it is a poor experience for our customer, and my team as a whole, we have all failed. You have to feel the pain equally.” Done well, the model also spreads skills across sites, with teams from one airport coming in to maintain assets another used to outsource, saving money and upskilling his own engineers.

None of this happens without hard conversations. James ran an organisational effectiveness review when he arrived, reassigned people and removed some roles. “The difficult conversation is never easy,” he says. “You have to approach it with the right mindset of improvement.” He treats the group’s standards the same way, as a starting point rather than scripture. MAG has written 20 stewardship steps, but “that is not set in stone. The only way you learn is implementation, then listening to your teams.”

The KPIs That Prove Airport Maintenance Is Working

MAG measures maintenance with a deliberate split between leading and lagging indicators, agreed as a group so every site is compared on the same basis.

“The leading measures are driven out of the maintenance teams on the ground,” James says. “Are we compliant to our PM schedule? Have we got our statutory inspections where they need to be?” Condition and criticality are then plotted together on a probability impact diagram, so assets that are both business-critical and deteriorating rise into the top right corner and get pulled back down before they fail.

The two groups of measures work together like this:

What About OEE?

The metric he is proudest to have imported from Rolls-Royce is Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), which measures availability, performance and quality together rather than uptime alone. He explains it with a security lane. “If I am planning to do 300 trays in an hour, did I hit 300 trays? And the quality matters,” he says. “If I did 300 trays but 100 needed rescanning because it was a poor image, that asset is not performing.”

That data also lets him move from calendar-based to usage-based servicing. “We can determine our plan based on utilisation rather than it being time-based,” James says. “That is where a lot of our financial gain comes from, because we are not over-maintaining assets. But in some cases we may have been under-maintaining them. It is finding that sweet spot.” If you are weighing up which measures to track, mapping them against your asset management software early makes the data far easier to trust later.

Where AI and Digital Twins Fit In Airport Maintenance Today

Ask James where artificial intelligence (AI) belongs in maintenance and he is enthusiastic but grounded. “I believe AI is a good multiplier. I do not think it fully replaces,” he says. “It gives our asset lifecycle engineers the data in a far more efficient way, and more enriched decision-making.”

The value shows up around a failure. “It can alert you as to what is likely to fail,” he explains. “It can scan your system to see if you have got one on the shelf, or whether you need to order one. Then it layers up other things, whether there is a how-to guide, the trained people and the tools to do the job, and the next slot in your schedule.”

He wants that intelligence built on data MAG owns, pushed into Maximo Monitor, IBM’s condition-monitoring layer, rather than parked on a third party’s servers. Years of engine testing also make him wary of collecting data for its own sake. “You have got to be careful not to read too much data,” he says. Capturing only what answers the question is the same thinking behind good predictive maintenance.

Nowhere is that clearer than the airfield, where James is building a digital twin, a live data model of a physical asset, at surface and sub-base level. “If I mount a scanner to a vehicle driving around the airfield, it can measure any defects on the surface,” he says. “We might know about a crack, but what I want to know is how quickly it is growing.” The cause often sits below the surface, in a sub-base being washed away by poor drainage, which is why he wants to see under the runway as well as across it.

Get the timing right and the numbers are large. “If I can extend the life of a runway by two or three years using data, that is where you earn your value as an asset manager,” James says, “because you are optimising the cost, risk and performance before you dig it out and replace it.”

Making the Business Case For Airport Maintenance

Much of the role is translating maintenance into language a board understands, and James’s advice is to drop the maintenance framing entirely. “You have to look at it through a business lens,” he says. “If you say we need this system because I can maintain things quicker, it will not work. You have to bring it back to cost, risk and performance across the business, and link them to a business KPI.”

He also thinks teams undersell their best work, because prevention is invisible. “The engineer gets high praise when they fix a breakdown, the superhero cape comes on,” he says. “The ones who do not get praised are the ones who fix it before it fails. That is the hard bit to sell.”

The answer is to price the failure that never happened. “If I did not let a baggage system fail, there could be a £300,000 return, and then you layer in the passenger experience and the brand reputation.” His summary is one any maintenance leader can borrow: “A good maintenance team protects value, it does not consume value.”