SAESL turbocharges aircraft engine maintenance with data and AI
The world's largest supplier of Rolls-Royce engine maintenance services is working with Kyndryl to modernise its IT infrastructure, build a single source of truth for data and scale up the use of AI across its business
When air travel roared back to life after the Covid-19 pandemic, Singapore Aero Engine Services (SAESL) found itself facing a welcome challenge: how to scale up fast enough to meet the growing demand for engine maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) services.
The Singapore-based joint venture between Rolls-Royce and SIA Engineering Company is the world’s largest MRO facility for Rolls-Royce Trent engines, handling around 30% of the engines that power large twin-aisle aircraft such as the Airbus A350, Boeing 787 and Airbus A380 worldwide.
The company posted revenues north of $1bn last year and has grown from 1,500 employees in 2022 to around 2,200 today, with business volumes up between 20% and 30% over the same period.
“The business challenge for us was to scale up and move over to the latest generation product portfolio,” said Sharael Taha, vice-president of strategy, project management office and digital at SAESL. “We’ve got to do that productively, profitably, and at the same time be able to leverage the latest technologies.”
To do that, SAESL decided early on that it needed more than a supplier. “We knew from the start that what we needed was not a transactional vendor, but a partner that we could hold hands with as we grow the business,” Taha said of the company's partnership with Kyndryl, which began in 2022.
From spreadsheets to a single source of truth
Like many established industrial firms, SAESL began its transformation journey with a largely on-premise IT estate and data scattered across the business in the form of spreadsheets.
“It was very difficult for us to string together data to come up with business insights,” Taha said, noting that the company had more than 77 enterprise programmes whose data needed to be brought together.
Working with Kyndryl, SAESL rebalanced its infrastructure across on-premise and cloud environments to cope with exponential growth in data and storage requirements. It also built a data lake to serve as a single source of truth that powers the dashboards and business insights that now inform decisions from the maintenance floor to the boardroom.
At the same time, it has had to manage the convergence between IT and operational technology (OT) in a 25-year-old business that owns machines of varying vintages. “We have some critical processes on machines that are 10 to 15 years old,” said Taha. “The challenge for us is, how do you operate a brownfield site with machines in different technological phases, so that we can drive business insights?”
SAESL started by connecting OT equipment such as vertical turret lathes, plasma spray systems, five-axis computer numerical control (CNC) machines and welding torches to monitor usage patterns via digital twins. The data helped the company to justify investments in new machines in the cautious post-Covid climate.
That OT backbone has since become the lifeblood of automation at SAESL’s expanding campus, which will feature automated storage and retrieval systems, autonomous mobile robots ferrying parts between facilities, and an advanced repair cell using additive manufacturing techniques such as directed laser deposition to print titanium and other materials onto engine parts.
Apart from the infrastructure work, SAESL also spent 18 months on business process re-engineering before it started migrating to a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and implementing manufacturing execution and warehouse management systems.
Mapping future-state business processes allowed SAESL to define a clear scope of work for each technology platform and gain a precise understanding of where the interfaces between systems would sit.
“It begins with the process first, not the technology,” Taha said. “Every single software vendor will tell you they can do everything end to end. As an organisation deciding who to partner with, a very important element is defining what you want to do.”
AI on the floor and in the back office
SAESL kicked off its AI journey with Kyndryl through Google’s AI Cloud Takeoff programme supported by Digital Industry Singapore, which funded the development of minimum viable products for early use cases.
One of the first was automating the review of master service agreements. “The legal and procurement teams take ages to review contracts,” said Neeraj Malhotra, director of client management at Kyndryl. “One of the use cases was to automate the redlining of standard clauses versus vendor-proposed clauses, with AI proposing changes in the language. It reduced the time spent on contract negotiation by 50%.”
Taha said the impact should not be underestimated: “Moving fast in contracts is one of the key things we’ve got to achieve, and a 50% reduction in lead time enabled us to move faster in this market.”
SAESL is now working on 24 AI use cases, including AI-powered visual inspection of engine parts. In September 2025, it signed an agreement with Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) to become an AI centre of excellence for manufacturing.
The company also leaned on Kyndryl to shape its AI governance strategy, drawing on Singapore’s model AI governance frameworks. “We clearly scope where AI can be used, and while the machine can detect or observe, the final decision still has to be human,” Taha said.
Scanning the threat horizon
With an expanding attack surface from growing digitalisation, SAESL also worked with Kyndryl to stand up a security operations centre (SOC) and harden its infrastructure. Beyond day-to-day operations, Taha said he values Kyndryl’s forward view of the cyber threat landscape, including the emerging risks posed by agentic AI.
“For any manufacturing organisation, cyber security may not necessarily be a core competency,” Taha said. “You're looking at a partner to help you manage the business risk together.”
The partnership itself has evolved from traditional service management to proactive infrastructure management using Kyndryl Bridge, the supplier’s AI-powered operations platform. Kyndryl staff with different skill sets – from cyber security to networking and AI – are also rotated into SAESL to build capability within the organisation.
For Taha, that exchange is what distinguishes a partnership from procurement: “It’s different from a traditional ‘this is the service I require, give me your quote’ relationship. This is a partnership where you are co-developing the capabilities together.”
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