The Knowledge Gap Aviation Hasn’t Solved Yet
In aviation sales, new hires usually ramp through a combination of SOP training, product and market education, system training, and shadowing experienced reps. They learn how the company handles RFQs, sourcing, quoting, customer approvals, margins, traceability, documentation, exchanges, repairs, and order handoffs. They are shown the ERP, taught where to look for inventory and pricing history, introduced to key customers and vendors, and given written procedures for the repeatable parts of the job. Then they spend time sitting with senior salespeople, watching how they research a part, interpret an RFQ, decide what to quote, negotiate pricing, and determine whether an opportunity is real.
The harder part is learning everything that isn't actually in the SOP. A new rep may understand the official quoting process in a week, but it can take months to learn which customers routinely shop pricing, which vendors are dependable, when a condition code matters, what historical sale is actually comparable, which inventory should be protected, and when something that looks like a good deal probably isn't. That knowledge is traditionally transferred through shadowing, asking questions, listening to experienced people, and making enough transactions to develop judgment. In many aviation businesses, that institutional knowledge, not the basic mechanics of creating a quote, is what determines how quickly a new salesperson becomes productive.
THE PART OF TRAINING THAT DOESN'T LIVE IN THE SOP
Experienced technicians can turn what they’ve learned into something the next person can understand, apply, and eventually teach again.
“A standard becomes scalable when someone other than the person who created it can reproduce it correctly.”
Credit that quote to Jet Midwest's Patrick Kraus, specifically his podcast interview with an industry veteran.
That idea gets to one of the most persistent problems in aviation operations. We've become very good at documenting procedure without becoming equally good at preserving judgment.
An SOP can tell a salesperson where to click, which fields have to be completed, what approvals are required, how an RFQ becomes a quote, or what documents need to accompany an order. What it usually can't explain is why an experienced salesperson chose one stock line over another, why they ignored the lowest historical sale, why they trust one supplier's lead time more than another's, why one customer's RFQ deserves immediate attention while another deserves caution, or why two transactions involving the same part number can require completely different commercial decisions.
For years, the industry has handled that gap in almost exactly the same way.
Put the new person next to the experienced person.
They shadow. They listen. They ask questions. They begin doing the work while someone checks it. They learn customer behavior, vendor tendencies, pricing patterns, inventory realities, documentation expectations, and the unwritten rules that rarely make their way into a training manual.
Eventually, enough individual transactions accumulate that what once required a question starts to feel like instinct.
There's nothing wrong with that model. Mentorship matters and it always will. The problem is that it doesn't scale particularly well.
The organization's ability to transfer knowledge remains constrained by the time, memory, availability, consistency, and teaching ability of the people who already possess it. A senior salesperson can only sit beside so many new hires. A purchasing manager can only answer the same supplier question so many times. A manager may remember why an exception was made three years ago, but if that explanation exists only in that manager's head, the business hasn't really retained the knowledge.
It's retained access to the person.
WE DIGITIZED THE TRANSACTION, NOT THE EXPERIENCE
Despite enormous advances in software, that basic architecture hasn't changed very much.
We've got better ERPs. Better search. Training videos. LMS platforms. Digital SOPs. Shared drives. Teams channels. Slack messages. CRM notes. Dashboards. Reporting systems. Searchable documents. Years of transaction history.
And yet a newly hired salesperson can still end up opening multiple screens to reconstruct why a customer received a particular price six months ago, reviewing old quotes to decide whether a comparable transaction is truly comparable, asking someone whether a vendor's promised lead time should be believed, checking inventory separately, reviewing condition and trace separately, searching comments for context, and finally sending a message to an experienced employee with the same question aviation companies have been answering person to person for decades:
“What would you do here?”
That question exposes the real gap. Aviation has done a tremendous job digitizing the transaction. We've done far less to digitize the experience required to interpret the transaction.
- We made records searchable.
- We made SOPs accessible.
- We made data reportable.
- We connected systems.
- We stored more history than ever before.
But having information and knowing what the information means aren't the same thing.
A salesperson can have ten years of transaction history available on a screen and still not know which three transactions actually matter to the decision in front of them.
RAMP TIME IS REALLY CONTEXT-ACQUISITION TIME
That's why ramp time is often misunderstood.
We tend to describe onboarding as a training problem. Teach the employee the ERP. Explain the SOPs. Introduce the products. Walk through quoting. Let them shadow someone. Review their work. Gradually expand authority.
But a significant portion of what we call ramp time is really context-acquisition time.
The new employee is building a mental model of the business.
Who buys what? Which customers are strategic? Which ones constantly shop the market? Which vendors consistently perform? Which ones look good on paper but create problems later? What represents a normal margin for this customer, part family, condition, or market situation? Which previous sales are useful benchmarks? Which inventory can actually be committed? When should an RFQ trigger sourcing? When is speed the priority, and when should the salesperson investigate more deeply?
Traditionally, every new employee has had to build much of that mental model individually.
That's the part we should be challenging.
THIS IS WHERE ELIA CHANGES THE CONVERSATION
ELIA, ERP.Aero's Embedded Layer of Intelligence in Aviation, is designed to bring the accumulated context of the business back into the transaction where the decision is actually being made.
That distinction matters.
ELIA isn't meant to be another destination an employee has to visit. It's not simply a chatbot sitting beside the ERP waiting for someone to formulate the perfect question. It works across the operational records already surrounding the user, including RFQs, parts, customers, quotations, sales orders, purchase orders, invoices, packing, shipping notices, tasks, events, comments, transaction history, and the information the company creates as it operates.
The objective isn't simply to retrieve information.
It's to make that information relevant to the decision.
Consider the new salesperson evaluating an RFQ.
Traditionally, we teach that person where customer history lives. Where previous quotations live. Where sales history lives. Where inventory lives. Where comments live. Where vendor information lives. Where purchasing history lives.
Then we rely on experience to teach them how to assemble those pieces into a commercial decision.
ELIA changes that burden.
Instead of only showing the employee where historical quotations are stored, it can help surface the history that's relevant to the transaction in front of them. Instead of requiring them to separately investigate the customer before understanding the opportunity, customer behavior can become part of the RFQ context. Instead of forcing them to reconstruct inventory, pricing, condition, previous sales, vendor activity, comments, and related transactions independently, those signals can be surfaced while the work is happening.
The salesperson no longer has to know every place to look before they can begin asking the right questions.
THE GOAL ISN'T TO REMOVE JUDGMENT
The goal isn't to have ELIA make every decision.
The goal is to accelerate the point at which good judgment can be exercised.
An experienced salesperson may already know that a particular customer frequently requests pricing but rarely purchases a certain family of parts. They may remember that a unit sold nine months ago at a price that looks relevant until condition, trace, market environment, or ownership is considered. They may know that a vendor routinely quotes aggressive lead times but historically delivers late. They may immediately recognize that what appears to be available inventory isn't commercially equivalent once allocation, ownership, condition, traceability, or inbound commitments are considered.
A new salesperson doesn't possess those memories yet. But the organization may possess the underlying evidence.
That's the opportunity.
ELIA can help expose the evidence around the decision so the employee doesn't need years of personal memory before gaining access to years of organizational experience.
That changes what onboarding can look like.
Instead of spending disproportionate amounts of training time teaching employees where information is located, organizations can spend more time teaching them why the information matters.
Instead of senior salespeople repeatedly answering questions whose evidence already exists somewhere in the operating record, they can spend more time teaching exceptions, negotiation, commercial strategy, customer relationships, market nuance, and the judgment that genuinely deserves mentorship.
Instead of managers functioning as human search engines for institutional memory, they can become teachers of reasoning.
That's a very different form of leverage.
THE SOP STILL MATTERS, BUT IT'S NO LONGER ENOUGH
An SOP remains essential because repeatable work still needs defined structure. Intelligence doesn't compensate for a broken workflow, and AI shouldn't be asked to invent consistency where the underlying process has never been made consistent.
- The SOP establishes what should happen.
- Operational history records what actually happened.
- Institutional knowledge explains why experienced people make certain decisions.
An embedded intelligence layer can help connect those three.
That's more important than simply making documentation easier to search.
Imagine training a salesperson by saying:
Before you quote, check the customer's history. Review previous sales. Validate the stock. Verify the condition. Understand ownership. Look at prior quotations. Check vendor performance if sourcing is required. Read the notes. Make sure there's nothing unusual.
That's a perfectly reasonable SOP.
But it still assumes the employee knows which history matters, which previous sale is comparable, which vendor performance signals deserve attention, what “unusual” looks like, and how those inputs should affect the final decision.
Now imagine the same employee operating inside a transaction where those signals are already being assembled around the work, relevant historical context is surfaced, unusual conditions are easier to identify, and the employee can interrogate the company's accumulated operational knowledge without leaving the workflow.
The first model teaches someone how to execute a process.
The second can help teach them how the business thinks while they execute it.
FROM INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE TO ORGANIZATIONAL INTELLIGENCE
There's another consequence that may matter even more than faster onboarding.
It can improve consistency among experienced employees themselves.
Institutional knowledge is enormously valuable, but institutional knowledge trapped inside individuals can create multiple versions of the truth. One salesperson prices according to one philosophy. Another remembers a different transaction. One buyer trusts a supplier because of five years of direct experience while someone in another office sees only the supplier's current quote. One manager remembers why a customer received an exception three years ago. Another employee sees only the resulting price.
The company technically has experience, but it doesn't necessarily have shared experience.
When context is captured through ordinary work, connected to the transaction, associated with outcomes, and made available again when similar decisions arise, individual experience starts accumulating into something larger.
Organizational intelligence.
That's the real progression from SOPs to intelligence.
A new aviation salesperson still needs training. They still need to understand RFQs, sourcing, quoting, exchanges, repairs, traceability, documentation, condition codes, inventory, quality requirements, pricing, margins, customer expectations, and the operating rules of the company they've joined.
They still need good managers.
They still benefit enormously from sitting beside someone who's spent ten or twenty years in the industry.
And they'll still need time to develop judgment of their own.
What should change is the assumption that they also need ten or twenty years before they can benefit from the knowledge the organization has already accumulated.
Because that knowledge already exists.
It exists in previous quotations. In customer behavior. In purchasing history. In vendor performance. In sales orders. In comments. In transaction outcomes. In pricing decisions. In exceptions. In inventory movement. In quality events. In tasks. In conversations. And, too often, in the memories of the people who happened to be there when something important happened.
The next generation of aviation systems should do more than preserve those records. They should help make the experience contained inside those records usable. That doesn't eliminate the experienced salesperson. It multiplies the value of having one.
It doesn't eliminate training.
It makes training richer because the employee is learning inside an operating environment capable of reinforcing what they're being taught.
It doesn't eliminate SOPs.
It gives the SOP something static documentation has always struggled to provide: the living context surrounding the rule.
And it doesn't eliminate institutional knowledge.
It gives the organization a better chance of keeping it. Why?
A procedure becomes useful when someone writes it down.
A process becomes repeatable when people follow it consistently.
But a business becomes truly scalable when the next employee can not only reproduce the procedure, but understand enough of the context behind it to reproduce the quality of the decision as well.
That's a much higher bar.
And it's increasingly the bar aviation companies should expect their systems to help them reach.
Because scalability isn't simply processing more RFQs, hiring more salespeople, adding another office, or implementing another piece of software.
It's making sure the person who joins tomorrow doesn't have to begin where the person who joined twenty years ago began.
They should begin with the accumulated experience of the organization already behind them.
I'll be in Orlando for ACPC ( Air Carriers Purchasing Conference ), August 29 through September 1 — if any of what I described sounds like your Monday or any day, come find me. I'm not going to pitch you from a slide. I'll pull up a real work order and we'll walk your actual process, live, and you tell me where it breaks. No booth theater, just come ask me the hard question.
Ralph Merhi i is the CEO of ERP.Aero, an aviation-native cloud ERP built for suppliers, distributors, brokers, MROs, OEMs, and many others. He brings more than 20 years of aviation experience across technology, operations, and sales. ERP.Aero connects the aviation transaction from RFQ through inventory, purchasing, repairs, quality, fulfillment, reporting, and embedded intelligence through ELIA.
