Accelerating mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) and turnaround-time (TAT) requires a new approach that hinges on activities at the beginning of a service visit. Much can be done to improve the inspection and analysis of equipment—trains, planes, automobiles, oil rigs, etc—which is when the scope of the job and the work plan is being established. This phase of the service visit will determine if the repair is fast or slow, and most maintenance solutions can't do a thing to improve it.

I bring this up for two reasons: 1) the inspection phase determines the work to be done and so plays a critical role in accelerating MTTR; 2) inspection consumes about 30% of total service time, which is a significant portion of TAT. (30% for inspection time has been reported by aircraft MROs and office equipment OEMs, so it seems like a reasonable value to use.) However, none of the EAM/MRO/ERP vendors offers a good solution for accelerating the inspection process. While optimizing maintenance schedules, work assignments and resource allocations is great functionality, it doesn't make equipment diagnosis any faster or more accurate. EAM/MRO/ERP software is based on a relational database that tracks discrete machines, tasks, people and parts, so while it's good for tracking progress and procuring resources, it doesn't help much for inspections. When a mechanic needs to verify a problem, they want service documents, not a database.

Once a problem has been confirmed, a maintenance plan must be established—typically consisting of one or more job cards (work cards). Most companies modify the OEM's job cards to suit their specific needs and manually load the tasks from each job card into the EAM/MRO/ERP database. (Loading this data brings more automation to the scheduling process.) While the lack of integration between OEM job cards and the maintenance database is bad, job card tasks are frequently superseded by service bulletins, engineering orders and regulatory requirements, which is worse. When that happens, the EAM/MRO/ERP database must be updated—a manual and time-consuming process. And the more equipment in the database, the more often updates are required. As a result, keeping the service database accurate becomes a full-time job—for a team of people.

For the foreseeable future, inspection will remain a manual process. Equipment with on-board diagnostics and remote monitoring will help, but it takes a long-time to develop, install and calibrate all the different electronic sensors that would be required to catch more than a fraction of the maintenance problems. To improve the situation, two things are needed: 1) interactive solutions based on service manuals that help mechanics interpret the condition of the equipment, compare it to the maintenance requirements, and feed that information into the database; 2) a way to compare updates (new revisions, SB, EO, TR, AD, MSDS, etc) to the current maintenance process and drive any approved changes into the EAM/MRO/ERP database. Companies need solutions that understand documents rather than databases, schematics not schedules.

Enigma provides this type of software. Enigma augments the EAM/MRO/ERP system by providing updated, integrated service and parts information, which accelerates the process of equipment inspection and delivers faster MTTR and TAT.

As more companies pursue lean and six-sigma for service, it's important to recognize that one of the largest bottlenecks to productivity sits at the very beginning of the maintenance process. Get the diagnosis right, ensure the job cards are accurate and then let the EAM/MRO/ERP software set the optimal schedule. That's how you improve uptime.

(Previous blog posts discussed lean/six-sigma in service and the "long-tail" of complex equipment maintenance for high-tech equipment and for aircraft.)

While this blog post does not include any direct quotes, the topic was inspired by an article in the October/November 2009 issue of Aircraft Commerce, "Improving the efficiency of hangar check planning & execution".