IT systems can help companies respond to maintenance emergencies. To highlight my point I’m using the situation at Southwest Airlines (SWA) as, in the wake of Flight 812, they work to address the problem of aluminum fuselage skin fatigue on their Boeing 737-300 aircraft. While I don’t know the details of how SWA and Boeing are responding to this situation, I imagine a lot of people are working long hours looking for ways to preserve safety and minimize the economic impact.

According to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) the aircraft in question was in compliance with maintenance requirements, so this is not something that SWA did wrong. In fact, Boeing engineers recommended the 737 fuselage be inspected once every 60,000 take-off and landing cycles. Since SWA 737s average 6 flights per day that means an inspection every 10,000 days, or about once every 27 years. (The aircraft that suffered skin failure had only 39,000 cycles on it.) Boeing recently issued a service bulletin (SB) to change the inspection limit to 30,000 cycles (13.5 years). However the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has gone further, issuing an emergency airworthiness directive (AD) mandating that older 737s be inspected every 500 cycles, at least until the cause of the problem is known. For SWA, that means every 83 days almost 80 aircraft must be taken out of service to undergo electromagnetic inspection of the fuselage. For a company that runs a lean organization, changing the maintenance interval on an essential piece of equipment from once every 27 years to once every 83 days is a really big deal.

This raises a question for every owner/operator of capital equipment, “Does your IT system help you respond to maintenance emergencies?” Not every service bulletin or maintenance revision represents an emergency. However, real emergencies are unpredictable and it’s hard to know which pieces of information will be needed to resolve one. So perhaps a better question would be, “Is the information in your IT system accurate and complete?”  Since you don’t know when the next emergency is coming, and you don’t know what information will be required, it’s important that reliable maintenance and parts data is always available.

The first challenge to maintaining accurate and complete service and parts data is that different suppliers provide technical content in different formats. This makes it difficult for information to flow seamlessly across various IT systems. For maintenance departments, the time and cost required to standardize document types and data formats (e.g. S1000D, ATA 2200, PDF, etc.) can be substantial. However, during a maintenance emergency these costs are irrelevant as planners, engineers and mechanics need immediate access to all applicable parts and service information to fix the problem. In the case of an airline, the required data may come from Boeing, Airbus or any one of over 300 suppliers. (The situation is similar in other industries.) Since safety carries such high implications (both moral and economic) finding a way to resolve the issue of multiple formats, while providing complete and accurate service and parts information, is imperative.

The second challenge to maintaining accurate and complete service and parts data is the rate at which it changes. During a recent asset management conference I took an informal poll and found that maintenance planners believe about half the information in their maintenance planning and inventory systems is out-of-date. That’s not surprising because the work involved to cull through all the technical documentation and update the IT systems can be overwhelming. (Anyone who works with mission-critical databases will tell you that keeping them accurate can be a full-time job.) Technical information changes so frequently that many companies simply wait until the next scheduled maintenance, or until something breaks, to update the maintenance and parts data. (Even then, information rarely gets updated in all databases.) However, this approach leaves a company ill-prepared to meet the demands of an emergency.

Since regularly managing multiple data formats and updating multiple databases appears to be cost-prohibitive, but the cost of an emergency appears to be even higher, what should a company do? The answer is to automate. New and revised information needs to be automatically extracted from updated documentation (maintenance manuals, parts catalogs, etc.) and loaded into the various databases. This activity can be automated, occurring whenever documents are received from the OEM/supplier. Enigma’s InService Revision Manager processes updates, in multiple formats and at any frequency, to keep IT systems accurate and complete, which provides value far beyond the aviation industry.

If you have a maintenance or parts database that never seems to be up-to-date, you may be closer to a problem than you realize. Anyone that’s involved in the day-to-day scramble of equipment maintenance, or has lived through the turmoil of an emergency, knows that reliable information is critical to making good decisions. Enigma has the technology to ensure you’re prepared.