Decades of institutional knowledge in people's heads, not in software.
AAR serves the global commercial, government, and defence aviation industries. Repair cycle management is the backbone of how aircraft components get fixed, tracked, and returned to service. But the existing workflows were manual, fragmented, and built on decades of institutional knowledge that lived in people's heads rather than in software.
The challenge was twofold: distil 30 years of collective stakeholder expertise into a digital product that could handle the complexity of aircraft component repair, and build something compelling enough to secure multi-year investment from innovation leadership — all while navigating a highly regulated industry where getting it wrong isn't an option.
The Repair Admin dashboard — aging analysis, status counts, and workload on a single canvas built around how the team actually thinks about a fleet of repairs.
An embedded design partnership across four phases.
We embedded with AAR's team across a phased engagement designed to move fast without cutting corners. From rapid prototyping to stakeholder buy-in to iterative design sprints, every phase was built to deliver clarity in a complex domain.
-
Rapid Prototyping & Validation
A three-month sprint to distil complex repair workflows into a clickable prototype, with deep-dive user research across technicians, engineers, and supply chain managers.
-
Stakeholder Storytelling (The Roadshow)
A high-fidelity interactive prototype taken on the road, presenting to audiences of 100+ across AAR's leadership and operations teams to secure multi-year investment.
-
Iterative Design Sprints
Six months of two-week design cycles with cross-functional teams across engineering, product, and operations — each sprint delivering testable increments.
-
Design QA & Dev Partnership
Embedded through implementation with weekly design QA reviews, ensuring what got built matched what got designed down to the interaction details.
Repair admins, repair managers, cost analysts, and supplier liaisons all touch the same set of orders — but each cares about a different slice of the data. Rather than build one homepage and call it done, we shaped a role-specific dashboard for every persona, sharing the same components but composing them around the question that role actually opens the app to answer.
Repair Manager view — fleet health, team workload, and approval queue in one frame
RCM list — every active repair order, filterable on the variables admins triage by
A platform built to scale, with a roadmap to match.
Deliverables included a comprehensive design system, responsive web application designs, detailed product strategy documentation, and a long-term product roadmap — giving AAR everything they needed to scale Airvolution well beyond the initial engagement.
The deepest validation came from the workflow screens themselves. Quote processing — historically the part of the cycle most prone to disputes and delays — was rebuilt as a single decision frame: cost entry, comparison data, supplier history, and the source documents all visible together rather than scattered across systems and inboxes.
Quote Processing — every variable a tech needs to make the call, in one frame
Supplier Receipt — documents, communication, and shipping pinned to the active workflow
The team made our most complex workflows feel obvious. Every stakeholder — from the technicians on the floor to the leadership writing the cheque — could see themselves in the product.AAR Innovation Lead