At last week's Field Service Medical 2012 Conference,  discussions centered on how medical device manufacturers could accomplish two apparently conflicting goals: 1) improve the quality and speed of service; 2) reduce the cost of customer support and tech pubs. These topics were repeated throughout the conference, which was well-attended by over a hundred representatives from leading medical device manufacturers across North America.

One recurring issue was the need to provide service technicians with the right documentation, at the point of service, so they can quickly repair equipment. Technicians spend too much time searching through paper catalogs, manuals and multiple databases to find answers to their service and parts questions.

Attendees told us that internet portal solutions haven't solved the problem because, even here, information is often out-of-date or requires special knowledge about how to use a content management system. Furthermore, for security reasons many customers block service technicians from accessing the internet while they're onsite. As a result, before going on a service call engineers will copy data and documents to their laptop and hope they picked the right information to perform a repair. But many times technicans overlook some document or bulletin that turns out to be important. In those situations the technician must call the OEM hot line (support center) to figure out what needs to be done, how to do it and what parts are required. This delays the repair and increases the burden on customer support (as well as downtime for the customer’s equipment).

OEMs are looking for a better way. Until they can consistently deliver accurate parts and service information to field engineers and technicians they know they'll be at a disadvantage. On the other hand, if they can give technicians a mobile technical library 1) they will provide better, faster service and 2) decrease the number of inbound calls to the hotline.

Toshiba America Medical Systems (TAMS) addressed this problem by implementing Enigma InService EPC, allowing field engineers to work onsite, without a network connection, and still access a complete bill of materials, troubleshoot a problem, and locate relevant, up-to-date service manuals and spare parts. Once these engineers connect with Toshiba’s ERP system they can complete any parts orders and deliver valuable feedback to the engineering department for ongoing improvement of products and support materials. As a result, TAMS service technicians perform with greater efficiency and productivity.

Enigma has always believed that the key to improving customer support, reducing repair time (MTTR) and improving quality (FTFR) is to ensure service technicians have a complete and accurate technical library of parts and service information—all the time, online or offline. Furthermore, OEMs must be able to update that data whenever it changes and keep it safe from prying eyes in a highly competitive environment. Enigma has the software tools and the experience to dramatically improve field service operations.

The attendees at Field Service Medical 2012 were extremely focused on the goal of increasing field service productivity and efficiency. We look forward to helping more field service organizations, such as TAMS, deliver on these goals.

At Field Service Medical 2012 in San Diego next week, Jonathan Yaron, Enigma’s CEO, will be participating in a panel called “Exploring Best Practices to Optimize Organizational Learning & Knowledge Management.”  After talking to the panel moderator, it’s clear that the panel has a single goal: to discuss ways to improve field service speed and quality.

A number of questions have been planned to spur the conversation, but audience participation will be the key to the panel’s success. With that in mind, we’ll share just two of the panel questions along with Enigma’s initial responses, just to get your minds working.

1. What are the challenges that your field service organization is facing? The companies that approach Enigma are typically experiencing one (or more) of these field service problems: 

• It takes too long for field service engineers (FSEs) to locate and download the right service information (especially diagnostics, service manuals/bulletins and parts catalogs).
• The technical content needed by FSEs (parts and procedures) is frequently out-of-date or inaccurate.
• It takes too long to respond to unplanned equipment downtime (emergency/break-fix).
• After FSEs service the equipment, documenting repairs and reporting maintenance notes is time consuming (and often “off-the-clock”).
• FSEs have little (or no) visibility into similar problems that have already been resolved by other engineers (i.e., emerging trends and best practices).

2. What is a best-practice for FSE organizations? Enigma’s customers (equipment OEMs, operators and service providers)  typically try to achieve the following: 

• Make FSEs more self-sufficient and effective (i.e., reduce customer support calls from field engineers).
• Make sure to deliver the right information into the hands of the FSE, wherever they are working, at the moment it’s needed.
• Make sure FSEs have a faster, more accurate response to unscheduled repairs (i.e., avoid FSEs calling into the hotline):

1. Deploy a single online/offline/mobile application that delivers a complete technical library of product, parts and service information.
2. Filter all technical information by equipment serial number (or product configuration) providing the most relevant parts, procedures and bulletins for the problem.
3. Collaborate with other experts using that same technical library—ask questions, document errors, verify procedures and write maintenance notes and best practices.
4. Integrate service and parts information with the back office—ERP, EAM, FSM, SPP (service scheduling, parts planning, inventory availability and alternates, ordering and logistics).

All of these topics, and more, will be addressed next week in San Diego. We hope to see you there; if you go, please attend the panel session and stop by the booth to get a live demo. Enigma’s panel session is scheduled for 3:25pm on the 24th, and we will be demonstrating our solutions in booth #2.

According to the December 2011 issue of MRO Management magazine (p. 56), Boeing plans to exploit their service and parts data and use it as a profit driver. Not surprisingly, Boeing is trying to position this as a good thing for the airlines. Let’s see if we can decipher what Boeing actually said. 

“One of the criticisms of GoldCare was that Boeing was trying to lock in the aftermarket services traditionally competed for by third-party MROs. Joe Brummitt, Director, Material Management Services [at Boeing], has two responses to this. First, he says, the airframe OEMs have increasingly decided to go to a single source for components, as multiple suppliers inevitably lead to higher aircraft purchase prices.”

In other words, when Boeing created GoldCare they limited access to technical information unless you were a GoldCare customer. In response, lots of airlines and MROs complained because it seemed to make Boeing the only player capable of working on Boeing aircraft, forcing others out of the maintenance business. When asked about monopolizing maintenance data and services, Boeing changes the topic to say that they’ve switched to single sourcing components. They claim this will decrease the cost of aircraft but what will it do to the cost of spare parts and inventory?

“[Brummitt] adds that a lot of OEMs have failed to recognise the commercial value of their intellectual property rights and have let them ‘leak out’ to be exploited by other people – a situation that is now changing."

In this one sentence, Boeing is clearly stating their intent to maximize profits by limiting access to aircraft service and parts information. (I.e., when it comes to maintenance data Boeing will prevent it from “leaking out,” which might harm Boeing’s commercial value.) Since restricting maintenance information will seriously impact the airlines, Boeing must have a good reason for doing this but nothing compelling comes out in the article. The most obvious reason is to make it too difficult and expensive for airlines and MROs to perform their own maintenance, so only Boeing can fix the airplanes. This may be one of the ways that Boeing plans to ‘exploit’ that so-called intellectual property. 

According to MRO Management magazine, “The argument also goes that no one knows the aircraft better than the OEM does, significantly reducing the risk of new aircraft introduction surprises. The OEM is also the only source of new aircraft technical information and is best placed to apply lessons learnt supporting the entire world fleet. Being involved in revisions to an airline’s maintenance programme further reduces risk by ensuring regulatory authority acceptance.”

The airlines we talk to claim they know their aircraft much better than Boeing does. Boeing builds them, but the airlines are operating them all day (and night). That’s why airlines hold the operating certificate. That’s why airlines are responsible for safety. That’s why airlines hold the profit-loss of flight operations, aircraft maintenance and parts inventory. That’s why airlines are the ones who must answer to the FAA, their shareholders, their employees and the general public for how well they meet those responsibilities. And the airlines we talk to believe they get the greatest value when they have choices about who, where, when and how their aircraft get serviced.

The article goes on to talk about Boeing’s resistance to PMA, “not from a wish to diminish a free market,” Brummitt says. The idea that Boeing would expect us to believe that statement is ridiculous. The article also describes Boeing’s ability to improve spare parts pooling, and how they have developed IT systems that can fix the airline’s inventory. “[Brummit] notes that airlines with larger purchasing departments, especially in the US, are far more reluctant to move to these newer business models with the result that many are holding too much inventory at a considerable cost to their companies.” This looks like a second way for Boeing to ‘exploit’ that so-called intellectual property. They plan to kill PMA and own the parts channel by restricting critical service and parts information. Combine that with single source parts, and their real objectives become clear: increased parts revenue and skyrocketing profits for Boeing.

The opening sentence on a Boeing web page says the following, “Boeing Commercial Airplanes, a business unit of The Boeing Company, is committed to being the leader in commercial aviation by offering airplanes and services that deliver superior design, efficiency and value to customers around the world.” I understand the meaning of superior design, Boeing does build nice airplanes, but it’s the airlines that determine if they’re receiving efficiency and value (not Boeing). And while most companies exist to make profits, how those profits are made says a lot about a company.

Since Boeing admits that airlines aren’t buying into their schemes, especially with regard to inventory, maybe the airlines understand that the short-term savings that have been promised will quickly turn into long-term costs once Boeing restricts access to technical information.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Boeing really is a good partner to their airline customers, as well as the MROs and other third party vendors that help keep Boeing airplanes flying safely. But if so, I’m left wondering what else Boeing might mean when they threaten to “recognise the commercial value of their intellectual property rights.” Whatever it means, it doesn’t sound very profitable for the airlines does it?

The December 2 blog post on Aviation Week’s “Turnaround Time” talks about Autodesk, a PLM software vendor, and suggests that the latest offering 1) qualifies as social media, and 2) will bring new opportunities for aerospace maintainers and manufacturers. (PLM stands for product lifecycle management, which is really just a fancy way of saying engineering data management.) With all due respect to the blogger, both arguments seem a bit of a stretch.

First of all, Autodesk 360 Nexus is a cloud-based PLM solution. Now just because it is “in the cloud” does not make it social, despite what the blog says: “So how does that relate to social media? Well, companies are finding better ways to share information about design data, and not just internally. PLM can make it easier for manufacturers and repairers to share data with one another for MRO purposes. So, it’s social. And it can be considered media, as companies are able to give each other pretty much any type of interactive video, graph or diagram that they need. Consumer social media tends to act as more of a marketing initiative for MRO companies more times than not, but this is the social media that gets the products out the door.” What does that mean?

Second, could it be true that Autodesk’s cloud solution is “the social media that gets products out the door?” Doubtful. The fact is that companies already share product information, with or without a cloud. Manufacturing companies are always looking to protect their intellectual property, therefore the benefits of cloud solutions are not based on sharing information but rather on reducing total hardware spend, improving IT staff productivity, increasing end user service levels, and reducing total spend on software licensing and maintenance.

Third, the blogger really stretches the definition of social media. Social media takes many forms (commonly blogs, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) Many vendors, including Enigma, have been making it possible to share information in various formats (or media): interactive video, pictures, 3D models, illustrations and diagrams. Just because a file format is 3D doesn't make the content “social.” And just because it's interactive doesn’t make it “media.”

The blog goes on to say: “… Autodesk’s command of the cloud will allow for more lightweight data, so maintenance technicians will eventually be able to look at information on their tablets and phones without much trouble at all. Again, doing CAD on a tablet is not going to happen yet, but imagine the types of apps for MRO that could come out of the woodwork if companies are using PLM more and more. Not many PLM solutions use the cloud yet, so I have a feeling that Autodesk is going to bring on many new opportunities that MROs haven’t even begun to think about yet. At a very simple level, PLM is a system for maintaining a product throughout its lifecycle, and the last stages of that include maintenance, repair and overhaul for aerospace components.

Now that statement is scary because it stretches the truth on so many levels. CAD/CAM systems have been spitting out 3D engineering data for over 20 years. For the past 10 years engineering managers have been trying to justify their CAD/CAM budget by claiming it helps in maintenance. It hasn’t happened yet. Why? Because the needs of engineering and the needs of maintenance are different, and engineering owns the data. In fact, Enigma has supported 3D data for many years but none of our customers use it. (That said, Enigma demonstrates this capability to almost every potential customer.) In the real world, 3D might be good for training mechanics but it’s not very practical in practice. Give a skilled mechanic a decent drawing with an integrated parts list and they’ll outperform the guy with the 3D glasses every time. (It's just faster.)

Is it true that maintenance technicians will use tablets in their daily work?  Yes, that’s why Enigma supports tablets. Could technicians use a cloud-based solution for this purpose? Yes, that’s why Enigma provides a cloud solution. (But again, it’s about controlling costs not to be “social.”) Do technicians need a PLM solution to perform their work? No.

Although PLM vendors have a significant role in design and manufacturing, their solutions seldom play a role for mechanics (though the vendors would undoubtedly like to change that). In two decades of Enigma supporting maintenance organizations, we have yet to see PLM be effective. (Despite what Autodesk, PTC and Dassault Systèmes want you to believe.)

Should there be a feedback loop between the maintenance staff and design engineers? Yes. And for many MRO organizations this feedback loop already exists. Enigma InService MRO is the prime example of an IT solution that enables maintenance planners and technicians to publish, share and revise (update) all technical content, including PLM illustrations such as schematics and drawings. Furthermore, users can attach notes to parts, schematics and service procedures, to collaborate with fellow technicians, planners and even the engineers at the OEM.

Finally, it’s questionable whether Autodesk has “command of the cloud.” No vendor can stake that claim. We don’t mean to be too negative toward our friends in the PLM world, but supporting engineers is very different from supporting mechanics. Just because you’re using buzzwords like “cloud, social and media” doesn’t mean you’ve figured it out.

The end of the year is a perfect time to look back on some of the blog posts written in the past few years. These posts were some of the most popular and we hope you find them timeless and relevant. From all of us at Enigma, Happy New Year!

The Value of SaaS-Based Service Information: IDC Speaks

A recent blog post by IDC Analyst Sheila Brennan (“Service Information Delivered as a Service Improves Quality”) validates what we’ve been saying: there’s great value in offering parts and service information via The Cloud, or in a SaaS-based offering. It’s good to see that others recognize the value of software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings in this space. There are not many to choose in this category: Enigma’s SaaS EPC solution is one of just a couple of them out there. The benefits of a SaaS offering appeal especially to the SMB market because it improves customer and dealer support with minimal impact on back-office IT resources and budgets, and reduces server hardware and maintenance costs. Brennan predicts that more companies will embrace Cloud-based content as the market and technology matures.

Forbes Says Online Documentation Is "A Critical Business Tool”

An article on Forbes.com indirectly speaks to why online parts catalogs are so critical to manufacturers and owner-operators of complex machinery.  We couldn’t agree more. The author Aaron Fulkerson writes, “Indeed, online product and services documentation has now proved to be an immensely effective way to increase new customer acquisition and to shorten sales cycles. It is now a critical business tool.” We couldn’t agree more.

Report from Aviation MRO Show: OEM Content Policies Create Problems

Our November 2010 blog wrap-up of the Aircraft Commerce Airline & Aerospace MRO & Operations IT Conference in Singapore struck a chord with many.  The strong message that came out of this conference—that “content is king” when it comes to successfully implementing MRO IT systems—will prompt the airlines and MROs to adopt a more independent approach vis-à-vis the OEMs and take control of the content that shapes and determines the efficiency of their maintenance operations.

With the holidays upon us (and four years of blog posts behind us), we thought this week would be a good time to reflect on a few of our most popular blog posts.

To all our readers: Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas and Happy Kwanzaa! 

Automation and Integration: A Conversation with British Airways and SAP about Aircraft MRO

Here’s a blog that summarizes a great webinar that Enigma co-sponsored with SAP and Air Transport World, featuring guest speakers Alun Pryer, the Design Authority Head of Engineering at British Airways, and Phil Te Hau, SAP’s Director of Solution Management for Airlines. The topic was “The Challenges of Aircraft Provisioning, Configuration and Maintenance Execution,” which has been of great interest to airlines and MRO shops. Pryer describes how British Airways is working to increase efficiency within maintenance and engineering.

Improving First Time Fix Rates — It’s Not About Scheduling

Field Service Management is a crowded technology field, and there’s much ado about the importance of scheduling service calls to improve first-time fix rates (FTFR). But what good is it to get a technician to the service call if he doesn’t have the right parts and service information at his fingertips? Even service technicians with “the right talent” can’t fix everything if they don’t have updated/accurate parts and service information.

OEM Data: The New Flying Fortress

Airplanes need to be serviced and replenished so that they can keep generating revenue. For that, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems exist: managing inventory, resources, planning and scheduling. In simple words, the ERP determines "who does what, when, and where?" Unfortunately, the technical documentation provided by manufacturers, which describes "how" to fix the airplanes, is not built to support modern airlines and their ERP systems. Using the B-17 analogy, it seems that OEMs care less about the "flying" and more about the "fortress."

A recent blog post by Sally Foster, a Technology Service Industry Association (TSIA) blogger, focuses on how much time an equipment owner loses when he/she must wait for a service technician. She writes mainly in terms of the hours that customers lose (while on the phone with customer support), or waiting for a service technician to show up. Foster references a TIME Moneyland article that says that nationwide we lost $38 billion in the last year, waiting for in-home service. 

Indeed, as consumers most of us can probably recall situations where we have waited a very long time for a technician to show up, or where we spent hours on the phone with customer support trying to resolve a problem. We are not only frustrated that our equipment isn’t working, we are doubly frustrated that we have to spend time just trying to get someone to fix it. 

Although it’s interesting to read about the value of consumers’ lost time, it would have been better if Foster had written about the costs that businesses incur when they have to wait for their equipment to be repaired. In various industries, getting efficient, effective service for broken equipment is even more important because they typically lose revenue opportunities when their equipment is down. 

The cost of downtime varies, depending on the amount of revenue the equipment generates per day/hour and the demand for its use. In the aviation industry downtime is extremely costly; it’s been estimated that an airline can lose as much as $250,000 per day when an aircraft is on the ground (commonly referred to as AOG). But what about other industries? When a car is undergoing service the costs are not so dear, but for a piece of heavy equipment like a crane or bulldozer, the lost opportunity costs can be significant, perhaps thousands of dollars per day. The costs are even more substantial for something like an MRI machine (in terms of both human health and revenue) or a semiconductor chip manufacturing machine.

That’s the main reason why field service organizations exist: to reduce equipment downtime. It’s why they invest in parts logistics and inventory solutions, and spend lots of resources trying to get expert technicians to a job site, as quickly as possible. But technicians (and customer support representatives) not only need to respond quickly to service requests, they need to be armed with accurate, complete parts and service information. This is what enables them to efficiently diagnose problems, identify and order the right parts and perform repairs, so they can get equipment up and running again. Accurate, accessible information at the point of need is the key to boosting first-time fix rates (FTFR), improving mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) and increasing mean time between failure (MTBF).

Updating and delivering that critical technical content to service technicians is not easy, because it involves large volumes of data, usually in different formats spread across multiple locations: EAM, ERP and ECM systems. But this is Enigma’s strength; we specialize in helping OEMs and operators publish and distribute technical documentation that is essential for maintaining complex machines. Companies that invest in field service solutions like Enigma InService EPC drastically increase equipment uptime, which means their customers don’t lose revenue while their machines sit idle.

An article by Ben Casselman in the Wall Street Journal (November 26, 2011) describes a recent survey by consulting firm Deloitte that found “83% of manufacturers reported a moderate or severe shortage of skilled production workers to hire.” And that “74% of manufacturers said a shortage of skilled production workers had a ‘significant negative impact’ on either their productivity or expansion plans.”

The article uncovers other evidence of growing demand for skilled jobs as well, “While hourly wages in the broad category of maintenance and repair workers rose 6.4% from 2007 to 2010, increases were 10% in the subcategory of heavy-vehicle mechanics and 15% for specialists in electrical repairs on commercial and industrial equipment. The implication is that employers were competing for a limited pool of qualified workers.”

Clearly the Wall Street Journal is challenging the notion that good jobs are hard to find. There is demand for skilled workers in the manufacturing sector.

For instance, according to the article “AAR Corp., a Chicago-based aviation-parts manufacturer, has 600 job openings, mostly for skilled trade jobs like welders and maintenance mechanics. Chief Executive David Storch said the shortage of workers has forced the company to pass up business and delay some manufacturing work. He said the company would like to start a third shift at its Indianapolis aircraft maintenance facility but has been unable to do so because of worker shortages.”

And while the shortage of skilled workers can be seen across multiple industries, retirement is making matters worse. Casselman’s story indicates that almost 10% of Union Pacific’s employees will retire in 2011 (4,000 out of 45,000).

Finally, in this slow economy it seems that companies are becoming more selective about who they hire. “Jeffrey Joerres, CEO of staffing firm Manpower Inc., said that with demand for their products weak, companies only want candidates who have all of the skills they are looking for, and if the companies can't find someone who fits the bill really well, they'll just leave the job unfilled.”

Think about it; companies are leaving skilled jobs unfilled. That indicates two things about today’s manufacturing sector:

1. Quality is more important than quantity (i.e., companies would rather do the job right than do it fast).
2. The return on investment (ROI) for training skilled workers is too low (i.e., the cost of training exceeds the revenue generated by an inexperienced worker). 

Given that over the past 20 years lean and six-sigma initiatives (LSS) have been implemented at almost every manufacturing company, the focus on quality isn’t surprising. However, the issue of training ROI is surprising. It’s amazing that companies have not yet applied their LSS expertise to address the bottlenecks in training skilled workers.

Skill is developed in two steps: knowledge and experience. For unskilled workers, knowledge is the technical information about how to perform a task; experience, on the other hand, is gained as they perform that task and apply that knowledge. There is no way to develop experience except through…experience. However, there are many ways to share knowledge. The closer you can bring the knowledge to the experience, the faster you develop a skilled workforce. In other words, when you get workers out of the classroom and into the field—and still provide them with the required knowledge—you revolutionize their training. This can simultaneously improve training ROI and work quality.

Enigma provides the technology to deliver knowledge, especially for organizations that maintain and repair complex equipment: planes, trains, trucks, cars, power sports, construction equipment, medical devices, semiconductor equipment, etc. Our solutions provide a one-stop shop of product information wherever it may be needed—consisting of parts and service information, best practices from the field, procurement, sales, remote collaboration, etc.—allowing workers to quickly apply knowledge and gain experience. With Enigma’s technology companies are empowering their service technicians to quickly become experts on the job, which improves equipment uptime, first-time-fix-rates (FTFR) and mean-time-to-repair (MTTR).

According to the Wall Street Journal, companies are looking for skilled workers. Enigma makes it cost-effective and easy for companies to train and develop skilled employees.

Boeing and Airbus are fierce competitors; it’s a well-documented fact. What’s not well-documented is their competition with the rest of the aviation industry. Boeing and Airbus compete on the following fronts: with each other, for big deals; with smaller OEMs, for smaller deals; with PMA manufacturers, for spare parts; with 3^rd party MRO shops, for maintenance/repair business; with their own airline customers, for maintenance/repair business; with independent software vendors (ISVs), for the technology that drives MRO and parts decisions. Boeing and Airbus apparently compete with (almost) everybody in the aviation ecosystem. 

Why do I bring this up? Because once you look past the quality of their airplanes, their products are just not that good. Certainly most airlines know more about what it takes to keep these airframes flying than the OEM does. Most airlines know more about what they need out of their IT systems than the OEM does as well. But the OEM marketing messages make it sound like they can solve any airline problem and their sales force makes offers that the airlines “can’t refuse.” Just remember, caveat emptor (buyer beware).

What’s becoming more clear is that Boeing and Airbus have done a masterful job of hiding their true objectives, which seem to be aimed at limiting access to aircraft maintenance manuals (AMM), illustrated parts catalogs (IPC) and other critical information…unless the airlines agree to use the OEM’s proprietary MRO and tech pubs solutions. Contrary to their public affirmations about being good corporate citizens, they appear to have no interest in cooperating on initiatives with vendors, customers or standards bodies (like ATA). I’ve now had several conversations with ISVs that tried to partner with the OEMs to improve operations at joint airline customers however, the OEMs told the ISVs…no. (I’m being polite about the “tone” of the OEMs’ rejection.)

This mimics what was said at Aviation Week’s MRO Americas 2011 Conference. During this event there were a number of senior airline executives publically expressing their displeasure over the tactics employed by Boeing and Airbus. (Here is a link to our blog about that conference.) Many IT vendors, including some of the largest in the world, also voiced complaints about the challenges of working with the OEMs. The OEM policies make it difficult for airlines to deploy fully-integrated solutions. Without the ability to integrate each IT component (i.e., MRO, ERP, SCM, ECM, tech pubs, configuration management, etc.) and make them readily accessible (to engineering, planning, logistics, hangar/line mechanics, etc.) the airlines cannot drive down costs and increase uptime. (Here’s a blog about Gartner’s report on KAL’s integrated system and a report on KAL’s presentation at an Aircraft Commerce event.)

Last spring I met with a senior ATA executive to discuss the OEM role in maintenance IT systems. Once we examined the OEM strategy from several perspectives—maintenance schedules, service revenue, parts selection/sales, inventory management—this ATA executive began to understand why many ISVs view Boeing and Airbus as competitors.

The competitive situation with the OEMs was highlighted in a recent article from MRO Global magazine (p. 12), “…it is hard to see the aftermarket remaining independent of the OEMs and this will lead to lack of data and choice for the operators on a scale not imaginable just ten years ago. Once the OEMs control the data then there is no going back.” The article continues (p. 14), “[Ronald Schaeuffele, CEO of Swiss Aviation Software] adds: ‘When Airbus delivers a new aircraft, the documents delivered with the aircraft – including the component list of the aircraft – are completely different from those Boeing delivers. The two manufacturers don’t seem to communicate on this issue; they don’t seem to be preoccupied with the data format of information they provide.’”

Contrary to this quote (above) Enigma’s experience indicates that the OEMs are very preoccupied with data formats, management and control. In fact, the negative impacts of the OEM strategy were highlighted at a SAP user group meeting for airlines (SUGAIR) back in 2010 (as reported in this blog). Clearly the OEMs know that aircraft MRO data is the key to increasing their aftermarket revenues. If OEMs control the data and IT systems used by the airline, they can lock-in parts and service business and set whatever price they desire. And while regulations require this same MRO data be provided to airlines so they can use it independently, the OEMs seem to be looking for ways to avoid this responsibility.

Fortunately, Enigma can cope with almost any data format, regardless of how bad the OEMs try to make it. While we would prefer clean standardized data, it appears that’s not part of the plan at Boeing and Airbus. As a result, airlines that recognize the value of MRO information—for providing competitive advantage around cost, service and asset utilization—are actively seeking out tools like Enigma as a key enabler of their strategic plans.

Unless car dealers pay an extra $1,200/year, Reynolds & Reynolds will hold their data hostage. Reynolds makes dealer management systems (DMS); a DMS helps dealers manage customers, parts inventory and service schedules. Dealers often allow trusted vendors and automotive OEMs to access the data within their DMS. They do this to simplify part sales using various online marketplaces and to accelerate sales reporting back to the OEM. (Dealers get incentive payments from OEMs when they “wholesale” parts.)

In a story from Automotive News, Reynolds admits they’re restricting the dealer’s strategic partners from accessing the DMS data. “Reynolds said data security is the reason that it has begun prohibiting third-party vendors from directly accessing the DMS of its dealer customers unless they have been certified by Reynolds. Without Reynolds certification, a third-party vendor can take as much or as little data from a dealer's DMS as the vendor chooses, without any way of verifying what was taken, [Reynolds spokesman Tom] Schwartz said. Reynolds refuses to allow that to protect consumers. ‘The data belongs to the dealers. We all agree on that,’ Schwartz said. ‘But we can't have people rooting around in a dealer's DMS. That creates a liability.’”

In other words, Reynolds is claiming to protect the dealers from themselves. This sounds similar to Big Brother from the book Nineteen Eighty-Four and raises the question, isn’t it up to the dealer to evaluate things like risk and liability? As one customer was quoted as saying, “It’s my data and our server.”

However, Reynolds does offer a solution. They’re willing to sell dealers an add-on software module, for $100/month, to ensure the security of the DMS data when accessed by an outside vendor. Reading the story carefully, it seems the real issue is that Reynolds doesn’t want companies that use competing products (specifically those from their direct competitor, ADP) to be able to access the data stored inside the dealer’s DMS. Reynolds wants to play a role in any parts or service transactions, so they’re squeezing their customers to get a piece of the action.

Why do I bring this up? Because dealers (and OEMs and vendors) can’t maximize profits unless software products exchange data seamlessly. For example, integrating an electronic parts catalog (EPC) with a DMS allows the dealer’s service advisors to quickly identify required parts and procedures, determine inventory availability and issue a repair order (RO). However, without integration the service advisor will be required to use multiple systems, which is inefficient and error prone.

The thing is, if Reynolds would make it easier (not harder) to extract relevant information from the DMS, they would build stronger relationships with customers, rather than alienating them. According to this article, for one dealership “the crackdown is the final straw in his decision to change DMS vendors when his five-year Reynolds contract runs out in a year.” Clearly this can’t be considered a “win” for Reynolds. For companies like Reynolds, limiting access to data may seem like a profitable strategy but it carries long-term risks that outweigh any short-term gains.

Making dealers pay a fee to let others access their data is basically holding their business hostage. Regardless of the “higher purpose” (in this case, security) no dealer should allow a self-proclaimed Big Brother to dictate what they do with their own data. As Reynolds and the dealers fight for the right to control data access, let’s hope the true reason for integration—efficiency, consistency, quality, cost—doesn’t get lost in the fray.