Our previous blog post talked about the challenges facing maintenance, repair and overhaul shops (MROs) in light of the decline in MRO work. Today’s blog elaborates on some of those challenges, and discusses some IT solutions that can help MROs reduce costs, which will help them weather the downturn in business.
Aircraft maintenance is anything but simple. The machines are expensive and complex, and they operate in an environment that is global, hazardous, and highly regulated. As a result, the back office systems and organizations that support aircraft must achieve multiple conflicting demands. It should come as no surprise therefore, that different organizations manage and use maintenance content in different ways.
Line maintenance relies on a technical library, which is used to resolve unscheduled and non-routine maintenance events that may result in flight delays. (There are as many as 12 different manuals used by line maintenance on a frequent basis.) In contrast, Base maintenance relies on a maintenance scheduling system and pre-defined job cards to assign and describe maintenance activities. (Line maintenance ultimately requires a job card as well but the process doesn’t start there.) Having different systems for each environment is not unreasonable because each organization has different responsibilities, cost drivers and time pressures. Thus there are separate departments, writing separate sets of documents, for separate audiences.
However, if the maintenance procedures in those systems are different there will be problems. If maintenance plans, job cards and technical manuals are not synchronized, then aircraft may not be properly maintained, which can result in fines.
Things get even more complicated with 3rd party MRO shops because technical content must now be sent and managed offsite. Nevertheless, the airline still owns the responsibility for ensuring proper maintenance.
When the countless OEM updates and airline-originated changes are taken into consideration the result is an enormous increase in workload for engineering, planning and tech pubs. Reconciling OEM updates with existing maintenance documentation has historically been a labor intensive and time-consuming process. And the longer it takes to process revisions, the less likely it is that technicians are working from the most up-to-date maintenance instructions, parts information, drawings and schematics.
These are some of the problems when maintenance systems have inconsistent information… what’s the solution? The solution is to synchronize tech pubs with maintenance planning and execution. Automated revision management and job card generation are just a couple of today’s IT offerings that can ensure each department is working with the same content, while speeding up the processes of managing the information and conducting maintenance.
When properly implemented, integrated and synchronized maintenance systems deliver lower turnaround times (TAT), and increased efficiency and consistency. If an MRO shop can brag about that, they can compete effectively against anyone, even when MRO industry growth is slow or flat. For more on this topic, playback the recorded webinar that Enigma conducted with SAP and HCL Axon.