MRO screen activity logger for SLA and slowness evidence

The moment a line technician or planner realises this is a problem isn't when the software is slow — it's the third time in a shift they've lost five minutes waiting for a work order screen to load, and they have no way to prove it to management or to the vendor. The freeze happened, the moment passed, and there's nothing to show for it except an anecdote.

The gap persists because MRO vendors are enterprise software suppliers with long renewal cycles and sticky contracts. The buyer — typically an IT director or VP of maintenance operations — hears complaints in passing but has no hard data to escalate. The users, the technicians and planners sitting at terminals, don't have the tools or the mandate to produce that data themselves. Nobody with purchasing power feels the pain acutely enough, often enough, with receipts.

What's missing isn't monitoring in the abstract — there are infrastructure monitors that track server CPU and memory. What's missing is client-side session recording that ties a specific user action (opening a work package, submitting a sign-off) to the elapsed time before the screen responded, logged continuously in the background without any user effort. When someone says the software 'can pause or get stuck on the same screen for seconds or even up to a minute,' that's a measurable event — but nobody is measuring it.

This is a business and not a feature because the need recurs at every contract renewal, every vendor negotiation, and every internal budget review. An airline that can show 47 minutes of lost technician time per shift per terminal, across 200 terminals, is looking at a concrete labor cost argument. That argument has to be rebuilt from scratch every time without this kind of tooling. The vendor has no incentive to build this because it would be used against them.

What to build

Build a lightweight Windows background agent that timestamps every application focus event and screen transition inside a specified MRO application, logs response latency per action type to a local database, and generates a weekly report showing average and worst-case load times per workflow step, exportable to CSV for vendor SLA disputes.

Where to start

Start with airlines already mid-contract-negotiation with an MRO software vendor, where the IT manager has a live incentive to gather performance evidence before the renewal deadline — cold outreach to procurement contacts at carriers known to be on legacy AeroTrac or AMOS contracts.

The hard part

Getting the agent installed across airline workstations requires IT security approval and sometimes airworthiness-adjacent change control processes, which can take months — meaning your first customer is a very slow close even if they want the product.

How it makes money

Annual license per site (not per seat, since the buyer cares about the fleet of terminals as a unit), with a one-time setup fee covering the agent deployment and initial report configuration.