Despite the effect of Covid-19, which brought almost all air traffic to a standstill, Satair pushed forward to solve one of the biggest dilemmas in the aviation maintenance industry: On the one hand, spare parts are too expensive to keep in stock; On the other hand, the cost of an aircraft grounded while awaiting spare parts can run as high as $500,000 per day.

The airline sought to balance the complex web of near and far deliveries of spare parts, where maintenance companies are stuck with expensive parts and the clock is ticking for inventory to be sold. Satair’s transformation strategy became clear: Change aviation buying from an ordering business (i.e., looking up products, submitting, and processing orders) to a customer experience business, and break with the status quo.

Merkle built a solution known as Marketplace, a one-stop marketplace fully integrated with Satair. The team delivered a complete rebuild of Satair’s entire customer facing technology over 18 months. This included a Hybris B2B headless commerce implementation with full integration to SAP ECC. Over five million products were synchronized from Satair’s own SAP ECC instance plus another from Airbus, with additional products. ​

The Marketplace creates new revenue streams for Satair by placing the company in a unique position as an intermediary in the value exchange, for example, between competing airlines. Satair provides sellers with advice on the "fair market value" of products based on real-time demand data from Satair's proprietary trading platform, as well as due diligence assessment of buyers and validation of sellers.

Customers can chat directly with suppliers, and Satair's platform offers one-cart checkout regardless of how many suppliers the customer purchases from.