The problem
In the maintenance world your goal is to minimize downtime, which almost always improves profits. Too often, incorrect technical content slows down the maintenance process. Therefore, a key to success is to provide mechanics with the most up-to-date content. However, a major problem is that the practices of airlines and OEMs are different. The OEM revises its manuals 1 – 4 times per year, whereas the airlines capture best practices all year long in the form of COCs (Customer Originated Changes) or supplemental content.

It is often assumed that airline COCs are incorporated back into the OEM manuals, but this is a matter of business process and money. Not all operators are interested in sharing their best practices with others, and when they do share they have to pay the OEM for this service. Even when the OEM incorporates some of the COCs , the operator needs to know which ones were included and which were left out.

Back to square one – at the end of day the operators don’t know if they have up-to-date content. They need to reconcile OEM changes with their COCs at least 4 times a year for each of the major manuals (AMM, IPC, WDM) and 1-3 times per year for others. The question is how to do it in a smart manner.

The Solution

The guidelines we followed when we developed a solution were the following:

1. Automation – Fast turnaround of content (evaluation and reconciliation)
2. Off-the-shelf/out-of-the-box – to avoid custom solutions that are expensive to maintain
3. Modularity – Separation between comparison, reconciliation (automatic and/or manual merging), approval workflow and publishing processes
4. Auditing and Traceability – provide traceability for the source of content in a published airline version and record actions taken (auto-merging or manual)
5. Agnostic – handles all types of content common to the MRO industry: XML, PDF, Binary files (such as images).

How it works…

Step 1 – Find the important changes
The solution identifies changes between versions by comparing the existing content to the OEM revision. The output of the comparison process is a simple log file that lists all the identified differences.

But there is a trick to it. In fact, an operator wants to identify only the relevant changes. For example, it is pretty obvious that “revision date” (REVDATE) is going to have a different value between two consecutive OEM versions. This is a type of change that needs to be filtered out to minimize confusion. Therefore the solution is configurable to let you include or exclude elements, attributes, instructions, control case sensitivity, etc.

Step 2 – Auto-merge the new OEM revision with existing content
The second step is to merge the approved OEM content with the existing operator version. This can be accomplished using the log file from Step 1 and a set of rules which are configurable. For example, a rule might say: “whenever there is a new OEM version and there is no COC – use the newest OEM version” or “whenever the OEM version is unchanged and a COC already exists – keep the COC”. These rules can go deep into a sub unit level to give the most complete control over the merge process. For example: “merge subtasks within a TASK and create the rule at the subtask level.”

Step 3 – Workflow
The result of the reconciliation is a set of files, divided into different cases based on the defined rules from Step 2. Each case then follows a publishing workflow that is either automatic or manual, depending on the results of the rules. This process creates the feed for your DMS (Document Management System).

The Enigma 3C® Revision Manager does everything listed above, and more. By tracking changes and resolving conflicts between multiple OEM revisions and between OEM versions, technical revisions (TR), COCs, and other equipment supplements, Enigma’s Revision Manager facilitates faster turnaround of technical content in your maintenance organization.