Revolutionize the MRO aftermarket industry as the undeniable market leader
Boeing Global Services has an ambitious goal to reach $50 billion in the MRO (maintenance, repair, and overhaul) aftermarket space by 2025, but currently not well established in the market.
// Problem
Today, Boeing is known as one of the leaders in aerospace for their aircraft, but when it comes to aftermarket for Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO), there are many other competitors that are capitalizing on the TAM. Unfortunately, Boeing is barely addressing the market and missing out on their competitive advantage.
The MRO market was estimated at $629.50 billion in 2021, with Boeing having a fractional impact with a lot of it focused on big contracts.
// Opportunity
Because Boeing is a Fortune 50 company, it has a lot of subsidiaries that enable them to bridge all of the different products and services under one purchasing experience to deliver on the demand of the MRO segment. This allows Boeing to strengthen the brand and extend their reach even further to downstream markets.
With the MRO market growing and estimated to reach $779.28 billion in 2030, Boeing is in a perfect position to evolve the market and deliver value to a broader audience.
// Personas
The MRO market is massive and addresses customers across Enterprise to aerospace enthusiasts that breaks out into Commercial, Business, and General Aviation. The primary audience for this initial product was starting bottom up, focusing on enthusiasts to mid-market. When it comes to larger enterprise customers, there are more logistics as purchasing happens through procurement and has different needs that a more consumer-driven purchasing experience can't satisfy
// Digital Ascent
Boeing's vision is to create a unified aftermarket ecosystem that delivers value across all touch points of the buying journey for Commercial, Business, and General Aviation customers. The program is the largest digital initiative for Boeing over the next couple of years, requiring multiple partners to bring this to fruition. We partnered with McKinsey, Slalom, and Accenture to plan, design, and develop the numerous products across the ecosystem of a multi-year program.
// My role
My role was to coordinate leadership, directional design thinking, and user research across our design team, partners, and Boeing. Being responsible for leading the team through the planning, execution, and delivery of the eCommerce UX and design, it was imperative to be in lockstep with everyone about decisions, direction, and next steps.
// Digital Ascent Designs
Phase 1
For MVP, we focused only on the B2C customers, but the vision is for B2B and B2C. The scope for the MVP was an end-to-end customer experience for registering an account, browsing, purchasing, and managing orders. Over three months, we collaborated with Accenture to plan, design, and develop the eCom site for Boeing.
The timeline to stand up the entire eCommerce website was very aggressive, so we decided as a team to utilize as much of Hybris' "out-of-the-box" features as we could. In the second phase, we would focus on enhancing the experience as we rolled out additional products and services to the platform.
Phase 2
In the second phase of design, we re-evaluated the UX and design. We wanted to challenge all the existing decisions we made based on the "out-of-the-box" UX and reestablish our design vision for what the eCommerce experience should be. Over the next month, we introduced a new design language and improved features and interactions to evolve the MVP into the NextGen experience to roll out during future releases.
// Key outcomes
We successfully launched the MVP in the three month phase 1. In preparation, the GTM was prepparing for the launch and preemptively was reaching out to customer in advanced to drive engagement.
We saw an immediate usage of the purchases coming from General Aviation and Business aviation customers within the three weeks, the website saw an average visit of 800k unique users per day. For the conversion of purchases, that wasn't able to be shared with us, but key stakeholders were feeling optimistic about what was trending.
Unfortunately, Boeing's 737 Max had some critical needs regarding the sensor failing back in 2019, so at that time, they decided to pause all initiatives for the foreseeable future. Phase two remained in the conceptual phase and never made it to development.