Founded in 2012, LATAM Airlines has grown to become the largest airline company in Latin America, transporting a record 82 million passengers in 2024. Long at the forefront of the Latin America aviation industry, their purpose is to elevate every trip, always.
Central to this mission is eMantto, their transformation in digital maintenance, which ensures aircraft safety and reliability and leverages digital tools that reduce overhead and increase productivity. LATAM prides themselves on their punctuality, and knows this entirely depends on operational efficiency.
Challenge: Aviation tech transformed in the wake of COVID-19
After the challenges faced during COVID-19, three emerging trends are rapidly reshaping the airline industry:
Customer expectations are higher than ever, forcing airlines to prioritize personalized experiences and seamless, undisrupted journeys.
- Financial constraints have limited traditional growth strategies, such as fleet expansion. Instead, the focus has shifted to digital technologies that drive efficiency and maximize existing resources.
- Airlines are adopting advanced technologies to create new standards in customer experiences and day-to-day operations.
Solution: Increasing operational efficiency through airline maintenance software
To tackle this challenge, LATAM tasked the eMantto team with closely examining and transforming their aircraft maintenance operations — one of the most complex, high-cost and safety-critical functions of any airline.
eMantto established four key areas for operations optimization and cost reduction:
Maximize reliability and availability through aircraft maintenance
Optimize total maintenance costs
Adhere to the highest levels of safety
Avoid impacting passenger experience
eMantto chose to partner with Thoughtworks because of their commitment to engineering excellence, change management, strategic support, and a track record of strengthening teams through digital innovation.
Leveraging continuous discovery to create digital transformation
The digital transformation started with a Lean Value Tree framework. This assisted in connecting the key areas to specific challenges and initiatives eMantto faced in their day-to-day airline maintenance operations, and worked to ensure their teams could deliver measurable results by defining clear KPIs and OKRs. The Thoughtworks team emphasised the importance of both best development practices and a mindset shift into a culture of experimentation — change management was a key contributor to enable the eMantto team, fostering a culture of experimentation and continuous discovery. This allowed them to work iteratively, test their assumptions and evolve their processes along the way.
This work into improving operational efficiency was spearheaded by the newly-established Value Exploration Squad, a team dedicated to accelerating value delivery in eMantto and LATAM's digital transformation by validating key business hypotheses, mapping the potential impact of transformation, and enabling a faster, more strategic go-to-market process. This team’s varied skill set combined design and product methodologies with data analysis, as well as AI tools such as Dovetail to analyze qualitative sources of information and further optimize the maintenance process.
Thoughtworks understood our need to stay ahead of the curve, to stay agile and efficient. Through our collaboration, we’ve developed the tools we need to strengthen our daily operations for LATAM.
Outcomes: Revolutionizing aviation tech and improving operational efficiency
The outcome of the collaboration between LATAM eMantto and Thoughtworks brought significant financial gains and process optimizations, including:
Activation of new touchpoints accelerated by value exploration in 50%
$50M in savings for the eMantto operation
92% adoption rate of new technology across eMantto’s teams
eMantto operations team satisfaction score of 4.7 out of 5
Evolving a system isn’t something that can happen overnight — and the team at Thoughtworks knew exactly how to track our impact so we could adopt an iterative approach, learn as we go and improve our processes in the long term.
Looking ahead: Improving operations, reducing downtime and investigating touchpoints
eMantto continues to build and improve upon their operations and digital solutions, developing and managing ten different tools across key touchpoints of LATAM’s airline maintenance operations. This toolset will support the entirety of the digital process, from the centralized planning of aircraft maintenance all the way through to on-the-ground engineering work.
