Data and Airworthiness - How to identify the state of your data quality & integrity and what to do next?

Before talking about the state of your data, let’s first get quickly into what is the meaning of data quality and data integrity.

Data quality refers to the overall level of excellence and trustworthiness of data. It is the measure of how well data meets the needs of its intended users and the degree to which it is fit for its intended purpose. Factors that contribute to data quality include accuracy, completeness, consistency, timeliness, and relevance.

The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) defines data quality as?Accuracy, Resolution, and Integrity.

Data integrity refers to the preservation of the data's accuracy and consistency over time. It is the measure of how well data is protected from unauthorized or unintended changes, and how well it is controlled to ensure that it remains accurate and consistent. Factors that contribute to data integrity include validation, security, and backups.

Relevance Of Data Quality and Integrity

What is the real tangible relevance of data quality for aircraft airworthiness and maintenance & engineering? Basically, one can see these in 3 distinct areas:

1.????Airworthiness compliance

2.????Efficiency gains in business processes

3.????Financial impact

1. Data Is Airworthiness Compliance

Everyone is aware that if data is not correctly entered into the MRO/M&E system there can be huge safety implications, these mainly revolve around issues with rotables (missing parts, discrepancies in paperwork versus actually installed, requirements due), modifications status, and any other controlled event that is overdue. If something isn't adding up correctly in the system or doesn't "feel" right, users often create workarounds.

However, this can lead to a situation where the information reported doesn't match the information in the MRO/M&E system, affecting data integrity and airworthiness compliance. Data indicates for an airline whether or not particular aircraft are airworthy. As we all say in aviation, safety is paramount, and data quality and consistency are directly related to it.

2. Efficiency Gains in Business Processes

Good data quality can mean huge efficiency gains and be money safer too. A reliable clean MRO/M&E system prevents double work from employees, avoids costly “rescue” operations, keeps your financial books tidy, and creates room for further automation and innovation.

In general, there are a lot of possibilities, for example on the data analytical side such as predictive maintenance and monitoring certain things that have operational benefits. However, that is only possible if there is data available, accessible, and obviously again on an appropriate level of quality.

3. Financial Impacts

If your state-of-the-art M&E/MRO system is not trusted or not providing expected data, it often leads 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.

Good data quality is money safer too. A reliable clean MRO/M&E system prevents double work from employees, avoids costly “rescue” operations, keeps your financial books tidy, and creates room for further automation and innovation. ?

3 typical examples of data quality and integrity issues

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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. Often, you’ll find out that the required data is incomplete, needs manipulation, and on top of that hard to acquire.

Why is that?

• During the introduction of the MRO/M&E system, the data was never cleaned properly, implicating problems from the beginning as the source was never correct as well.
• Employees are aware that procedures are not followed properly in the chain, and many workarounds have been applied in the course of the history of the system making it unreliable or, at best, giving slight concerns to the user base.
• Multiple systems are used in parallel which will have, for sure, synchronization issues at some point in time and create doubt among the company about which system should be used and, more importantly, which system is correct.

Some of these problems look seemingly innocent and are often considered insignificant compared to the sheer size of modern datasets. But be aware, down the line, small issues can and will have an exponential impact as the dataset grows, eventually leading to things such as full inventory audits to verify your stock and the value it represents, doing labor intensive dirty fingerprint checks because of high doubts of the system status. Or, in the worst-case scenario, keeping an aircraft AOG as there might be discovered that critical items are overdue making the aircraft instantly non-airworthy, potentially shortening its economic life. We’ve seen real-life materialization of all of these examples during our work in the field.

What to do

Addressing data issues and the impact these have on efficiency and costs of daily business processes starts with establishing a baseline view of where data issues exist and which impact these have on airworthiness compliance, costs of maintenance, or costs of performing a certain business process.

1.?Use a modern MRO/M&E System (if not in place yet)

• Start using a modern MRO/M&E system that helps to manage data.
• It will be easier to keep your data centralized and synergized.
• Prevent having data sources outside of the system!

2.???Full data health check & impact assessment

• A full data health check on the system to identify the full scope of issues and their impact as well as corrective and preventive actions required to correct the data.
• Some items might be more difficult to solve, and others might be easier to fix. Subsequently, each correction of data might have a different impact. Assessing each observation in an ease-impact overview allows one to identify a proper sequence of corrective & preventive actions.

3.???Dedicated Taskforce

• Correction of some data issues can be a project on their own. Think of updating all task cards in the maintenance program with the correct manpower and tooling requirements, or a full review of documents status per aircraft. With CAMO engineers needing their full attention on managing daily business processes, an investment needs to be made in deploying a dedicated task force with adequate knowledge to address the identified data issues in an effective manner.

4.???Standards And Definitions

• Establish business processes and workplace instructions that include data standards to get everyone working the same way. Data quality starts with data entry.
• Set up standards & definitions in the MRO/M&E system that have been agreed upon and adhere to them!

5.??Store Historical Data for Later Usage

• Historical data can often be found outside the MRO/M&E system, or in physical archives. Where possible consolidate this data in one system.
• Storing historical data digitally will enable additional data analyses. E.g., if the quantity and quality of the data are at an adequate level, predictive analytics will be possible in some areas.

6.?Data Verifications and Analytics Tools

• As tons of data is added daily by users and systems ‘dirty data’ is inevitable, even if all previous tips have been followed. A solution for continued monitoring of data health needs to be activated on the system used to detect any potential new issues arising at an early stage and address these prior to causing further harm downstream.
• Implementing automated data validation processes can help to ensure that data meets certain standards, such as format, range, and consistency. Performing these automated checks on a certain schedule is necessary to monitor data quality.
• The identified issues can then be rectified with the help of data alteration tools.

?Customer example

Situation?

The helicopter operator has been using its current MRO software system for more than 10 years.?Data integrity issues caused by the initial data migration impair the usage of the MRO software system. This has led to inconsistent airworthiness data resulting in the grounding of aircraft and the creation of multiple workarounds in business processes.

Solution

A means to conduct fully automatic data validation and airworthiness consistency checks to maintain a standardized level of aircraft data quality. Covering areas such as maintenance programs, ADs, SBs, Mods, Aircraft configuration, Maintenance Last Done & Next Due, Hours & Cycles accumulation, part assemblies, and much more. Being able to directly identify required actions to avoid aircraft data issues that might result in the grounding of aircraft.

Using our software solution NEXUS the helicopter operator now monitors and manages its data easily and identifies flawed data added to the system.

Benefits

• Stay compliant - all airworthiness compliance data is fully and correctly available in the MRO/M&E software system.?
• All gaps and deficiencies have been identified and can be eliminated to avoid groundings and penalties.
• No manual data correction and collection for reporting anymore.
• No manual workarounds anymore that caused inconsistencies in the data and as such reduced total costs of ownership.
• Directly having an accurate picture of the maintenance forecast.
• No doubts anymore about which components are installed on an aircraft.
• You have access to a dashboard per aircraft that shows where the most urgent issues exist requiring immediate attention.?

NEXUS? is a software solution in aviation that helps you to manage all your aircraft airworthiness and maintenance data. A software solution in conjunction with your MRO/M&E system to manage, collect and exchange data, whilst retaining confidence in data quality and accuracy.

?Conduct automated aircraft phase-ins

?Have full data validation and airworthiness consistency checks

?Have a backfill with OEM data

?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