5 signs Data is Costing Time and Money in Aircraft Maintenance and how to change it

When thinking of aircraft maintenance costs, the quickest rationale is to take your costs for scheduled maintenance, add a margin for unscheduled maintenance costs divide it by 365 days, and there you have your Daily Maintenance Costs. When the need arises to drive down these costs the focus mostly turns to what can be done to have lower scheduled maintenance costs. Technical departments are reorganized, management layers are torn down and job roles are redefined seeking further optimization and efficiency. However, a factor frequently overlooked and potentially holding much potential is underlying process inefficiencies that originate from a lack of data integrity and data quality. In this article, we explore the concept of how data can cost E&M organizations money, what the signs are to watch out for and what? E&M teams can do to address these issues. Perhaps even preventing the need for the next round of reorganizations:?

Data is driving every CAMO and MRO organization. Where it used to be paper-based, many organizations within the aviation industry have digitized most of the core business or are?in the progress of full digitization. If you have not started yet, you can read some tips in our blog: 'How to start with data analytics although much of the information is still paper-based.

Being digital is a big leap forward, but unfortunately not the magic potion that immediately solves all your problems and headaches. The effect of digitalization is that the company is increasingly (automatically) data-driven, but some of the data in the background driving the results might also have less immediate visibility.

Lack of data integrity?can be from the past when data has not been properly cleansed before it was digitized or can creep in naturally during normal working processes. It is always important to keep in mind that it exists and will need continuous monitoring and improvement to keep it at bay.

As you might be?aware,?lacking integrity and quality can affect aircraft maintenance execution as well as continuous airworthiness management severely and result in it a lot of additional costs. For more details about data integrity and quality read this blog:?Tips and Tricks: Data Quality vs Data Integrity and what can Data Enrichment do.?

The Signs

Here are a few signs when data is starting to cost you money:

1. Repeating Issues/Questions/Work Arounds

The most important sign is quite simple, listen to your engineers and mechanics and their interactions. These discussions are a very valuable source of information and indicator if there might be underlying data issues. Repeated questions and/or issues regarding the statuses of aircraft, components, orders, etc. from the same group of people, indicate that there might be a data issue. If colleagues then start introducing or talking about workarounds or different methods of retrieving this then your normal process, all alarm bells should be ringing.

Your state-of-the-art M&E system is apparently not trusted or not providing the data that is expected. This could lead to (expensive) and undetected mistakes on the aircraft, but more importantly, people are putting considerate time into investigating data and or even creating workarounds whereas this should be a simple output of the system.

Consequence: People might feel they are understaffed and your hire additional resources to cope with the work. It can become a self-sustaining loop that brings a lot of unnecessary costs: the solution is at the source, find the cause, and fix the bad data…

2. Audit Findings

Audit findings can be small or severe, but they are not the most fun to deal with. Incidental findings will always exist and occur, however, as soon as findings become structural you know something is wrong. Data issues are one of the obvious culprits.

Consequence: These findings could potentially slightly damage your reputation, can even result in aircraft groundings, and lead to unexpected short-term costs to rectify.?

3. Standard Reports That Take Days To Finish

Things such as lease reports or reliability of the initial statistics, which are produced in a set interval and standardized way, should be relatively easy to produce. If these structurally take a long time to make, it should trigger you as a team leader to start investigating why.

More often than not, you’ll find out that the required data is hard to acquire and/or incomplete, and people will double- or even triple-check because they’ve had issues in the past.

Consequence: It is not uncommon that entire full-time functions are created, many unintentionally established over the years, for generating these reports. In turn, this generates unnecessary staff costs and, because it could be a dread, it’s impacting the motivation of your employees.

4. Backlog In Paperwork

An increasing backlog in paperwork to be processed is also a tell-tale sign that you are incurring costs that can be prevented. Other than that the root cause of the backlog can be caused by data issues themselves, the overall problem is that more effort is created on the forecasting end of things.

When an M&E/MRO system is not up-to-date, the maintenance forecast will also not be accurate and could demand additional work from your maintenance planners and engineers to find out the correct status by querying the dirty fingerprint work.

Consequence: Planners and are in a constant workaround to get an accurate picture of their maintenance forecast instead of letting the system provide them with that accuracy and do their core job of planning.

5. Component Tracking And Inventory

As you know in aircraft maintenance a significant, but also delicate, part of the work is the tracking of aircraft components. It is paramount for both safety as well as costs that this is accurate, but reality dictates that unfortunately, this is a highly error-prone process.

Unsurprisingly, as soon as you notice there are issues with the label booking administration, part requirement actuals, repair tracking, and/or inventory these are signs that it starts costing money as well. Components can be very costly and have a far-reaching effect on the airworthiness of the aircraft.

Consequence: Next to direct incurring costs by having to replace components or missing components, there are also the time/material costs of your staff to investigate all these cases and figure out the truth. This can go as far as having re-inspected the aircraft to determine the correct components installed.

What Can You Do Right Now?

1. It cannot be stressed enough but keep looking out for signals in the day-to-day activities with the above examples in mind. Data issues creep in over time and thus could be hard to detect on “face value” at first until it is far spread.
2. Clear procedures and workplace instruction, together with a “fool-proof” system are key to preventing data errors. Anything that can be interpreted multiple ways is a potential risk.
3. An open culture where people can report mistakes and with frequent internal data quality checks will help. Most importantly is that there is a culture where people immediately act on reported issues and try to correct and prevent them at its core, rather than think of a patch or workaround.

Make use of the latest Technology

Here at EXSYN, we’ve built up extensive experience in dealing with the challenges of managing aircraft data. Now we’ve put this experience into your hands with NEXUS – the software solution to collect and exchange data, whilst retaining confidence in data quality and accuracy.

With NEXUS we help airlines to set the standards for proper data management so that you can trust the data in your MRO/M&E system and drive value from your data, reducing costs and increasing efficiency.

We bridge the gap between airworthiness management, data, and IT. Enabling you to do quick aircraft airworthiness data checks, without the need for any programming or data science skills.

NEXUS is a software solution in conjunction with your MRO/M&E system landscape to manage, collect and exchange data, whilst retaining confidence in data quality and accuracy:

• Prepare and ingest aircraft data to have it all in one place and in the right format
• Conduct automated aircraft phase-ins
• Have full data validation and airworthiness consistency checks
• Have a backfill with OEM data
• Ensure industry and your operator standards are enforced across the whole dataset
• Be able to have continuous Data Health Checks
• Use self-service reports such as maintenance due forecast
• Have interfaces for automatic data exchange
• Use Robotic Process Automation for automatic data uploads and checks