Sales and marketing · Defense tech
The factory was built for 150 aircraft a year. The market only saw a parts counter.
A factory built for 150 aircraft a year was selling itself one part at a time. Its own customers ran on a schedule nobody had bothered to look at.
The company's own materials described a parts business — someone asks, you find it, you ship it. I went to look at what Aviatex actually was before taking that description at face value: 8,000 square metres in Prague, eighteen work areas running from the lamination shop to final assembly, 43 people including two test pilots, and exclusive selling rights for two Czech aircraft manufacturers. What that kind of plant needs to stop selling like a shop is the subject of what breaks first between prototype and series production.
Before / after
- 01 / Before
A reactive request queue: a part comes in, someone sources it, it ships. No pipeline, no forward visibility, nothing that survives past the invoice.
- 02 / 2019–2022
Repositioning, brand, CRM and warehouse systems went in while the offer moved from parts vendor to supply partner.
- 03 / After
Roughly six months of forward visibility on an estimated $2.8M of annual component demand, built around partners' own maintenance schedules.
What changed, in order
- Repositioned from parts seller to supply partner: from "we will find that part" to "your maintenance window is covered"
- Built the model around partners running scheduled maintenance, so future demand became knowable
- Supplied ahead of the maintenance window instead of waiting for the call
- Put in a CRM and an ERP-equivalent for the warehouse, because planned supply falls apart immediately without stock visibility
Aviatex was later acquired by Omnipol, and the staff moved into the group. That happened afterward, on its own terms — it's what came next, not a result of this work.
If your business sells to people running on a schedule you could actually know — maintenance windows, renewal dates, seasonal cycles — check whether you're waiting for the phone to ring on something you could already see coming.
- ~$2.8M
- supply pipeline made forecastableEstimated annual component volume across planned-maintenance partners
- 6 mo
- forward demand visibilityFrom effectively none
- 150
- UAV/yr of unused build capacity found8,000 sq.m plant, 18 work areas, 43 staff
The full engagement record
Aviatex — case study