The digital D.O.M

?THE DIGITAL D.O.M.

?How going mobile and paperless in your daily operations is your best path to peace of mind

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AN ERA OF PRODUCTIVITY

Digital transformation is now mature and with no doubt changed our ways of working in less time than any other disruptive evolution in history.

Beyond the new technological capabilities, accelerated by a 2-year pandemic, allowing everyone to connect, work and interact from anywhere with a simple mobile phone, it has been shown that enterprises across all industries with high digital intensity (last gen software, faster internet access, updated digital skills,…) have improved their productivity by 20% in the 2010-2020 decade. On the contrary, low tech companies have struggled to reach a 5% increase. https://www.oecd.org/economy/growth/digitalisation-productivity-and-inclusiveness/

Aviation Maintenance is no exception to this pattern and larger players are now massively changing their "old habits" (paper, excel, emails...) and installing new solutions to optimize their processes. They had their 1st initiatives in the early 2000s when investing in modernized back office solutions such as HR, Sales, Finance with SaaS business models, and ultimately connected all internal systems to limit double entries.?

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During this era, major software vendors offering horizontal layers such as Salesforce (CRM), SAP (ERP) or Microsoft (Office,Skype, Teams) have over performed. Later, industry specific solutions offered major evolutions to embed innovations, revisit automated business workflows, and design large APIs libraries that will save time & limit errors.?

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BEHIND THE TECH, THE USER

Our experience, migrating dozens of clients from on-premise-aged software to our AIR22 web-based system, proves that the behavioral aspect of digital transformation is as equally important as technological innovations and, therefore, has a huge impact on the overall gains.?

At our specific level of providing solutions to the aviation maintenance managers and their teams, we benchmarked today's usage of a digitalized workplace against the previous landscape made of desktop computers, servers and cubic meters of paper archives !! Here is some data we would like to share.

Indeed, when we focus on the person in charge of maintenance, we observe that the capacity to act & interact in real-time, away from the office desktop computer by using a tablet, enhances their relationship with their employees, management, clients, suppliers and events (planned and often unplanned)…

One of our clients would spend days, sometimes weeks, chasing individuals for physical signatures. His experience is shared by many others, between the company’s 3 operational bases and 50+ staff, he was always looking for someone… Using the digital signatures embedded in the solution he drastically reduced his time for this low value task. An estimated 50% gain !

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Sean Smith, currently heading the Support & Services department at AMS, and former Director of Maintenance at two different companies, at different times says “We maintained the training records, scheduling, and tracked the billable hours in different spreadsheets, software solutions, and hard copies that were kept in the company files. It was a constant struggle to make sure the records were properly updated and there was continuity between them”.?

When the company had audits, S. Smith continues “We often had findings related to different record sets not agreeing with each other, the root cause was the system we were using was too complicated and open to errors. The lack of access to the information when members of my team and I were away from our offices and computers was also a contributing factor ”. Moving to a mobile version and having everything in one solution that he and his team could access from virtually anywhere reduced or eliminated the audit findings related to the continuity of the records. S. Smith summarizes “it made my life easier managing a team spread over several Canadian provinces and everybody benefited from this new simplified work environment”.

At the end of the day, going mobile will help creating new ways of navigating through the daily tasks and duties and will have a huge impact, both on your own productivity and your co-workers.

New ways of managing your daily operations in a mobile environment is as simple as using the “UPDATE TASK”? button as presented in the illustrations below. Using AIR22 (AMS latest solution for maintenance organizations) and a tablet (in the screenshots below, an ipad) when walking the shop floor along with his maintenance team, the DOM can refer to and update on the fly the different information such as component status, enter defects found during a maintenance event, order and check status of parts required for tasks, and update the schedule based on current information.

The workflows are managed with the AIR22 workshop interface (left) and tasks can be updated with a dedicated screen (right)

In the routine of a DOM managing the workload of 15 engineers working simultaneously, we could measure up to? 20% time and 10% error reduction. Using a single integrated solution to manage your maintenance work flows reduces the time spent duplicating information, and verifying information in multiple places.

THE PAPERLESS FREEDOM

The underlying key success factor of your mobile productivity (and peace of mind!) is the paperless strategy.?

No longer should it be an industry joke that the aircraft isn’t serviceable until the paperwork outweighs the aircraft. There’s no need for that with a digital workflow where each step in the workflow reinforces the next, seamlessly moving the information forward through the workflow resulting in concise documentation and records.???

The traditional life cycle of documents that has been the rule for decades is now going obsolete.

How fastidious is this ? classic ? workflow:?

• create a doc (ie. A timesheet)
• print (this implies a printer that does work…)
• fill the document (do you have a pen ?)
• scan the document (that implies a PhD, minimum…)
• share the digital copy & archive the physical (and share digitally where the physical archive is…)

All this process is both a huge time burden and financial cost. Some larger players, or unorganized smaller ones can spend in the 100s thousands $ a year (paper, printers, archive space,... https://www.commusoft.us/paperless-savings-calculator/)

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Most maintenance organizations and ultimately the Director of Maintenance as the leader of the organization struggle with the usage of outdated copies of work package documentation by maintainers and records keeping personnel. Having the work package documentation readily available on tablets or laptop computers anywhere there is a network connection ensures everyone is using the current version of the work package. Since everyone is working on the exact same version of the documentation, everyone has a real time view of the progress of the work being performed, and what is left to be done.?

As already mentioned, chasing signatures is a huge burden and determining who made what changes in the work package at the end of a large maintenance project is often a time consuming and frustrating experience. Digital documentation means there’s an audit trail of who made what changes to the records. Using Electronic signatures the person(s) certifying documents the individual(s) that need to certify documents are first notified and then can certify the document without you having to physically take the document to them. As long as they are connected to the internet, they can certify the document.

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During one of my clients' visits, I remember this quality manager at a large MRO who used to spend days in a no-window, poorly-lit room opening boxes and arranging papers on the floor so the auditor could consult the documents.?

Today, the very same room is now a cozy coffee break area with sofas and a large screen on the wall. Digital documentation is easily searched for information in minutes rather than hours of manually going through records and pushed to the audience directly on the meeting room screen…

One of the most impressive benchmarks we could measure in the digitalization of operations is the case of an aircraft transfer with all its components and related maintenance. Done via electronic means with other organizations the process being operated digitally? is saving 10s or 100s of hours of manual data input.

The current initiative co-ordinated by ICAO to develop a standard for Electronic Aircraft Maintenance Records (EAMR) and Continuing Airworthiness Records for aircraft components will bring even more security and efficiency to these transfers.?

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Indeed, when adding a new aircraft to the fleet, one of the biggest tasks is reviewing the sometimes dozens of boxes of paper records and inputting them into your company's chosen maintenance information solution, or when selling or doing a lease return of an aircraft collecting up and organizing all the records to be sent with the aircraft.?

Using AIR22 and digital templates such as the “SYSTEM MODELS” (illustration below) will ease this new aircraft setup. Using these models and other shortcuts such as the “applicability rules” powerful engine in the solution led the CEO of one of the European leading CAMO organization saying “the phase-in for our ATR42 fleet has gone down from severals weeks to just 10 days”

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At the end of the day, running your aircraft / parts maintenance operations with a MOBILE & PAPERLESS strategy will not only save you time and money, showing a huge return on investment but most importantly will make you a happy Digital DOM with all the power in your hands to work freely anywhere.?

Happy Digital DOM will generate beautiful reports, graphs and statistics.?

Happy Digital DOM will have all the relevant information to interact with his peers.?

Happy Digital DOM will save his company money.?

Happy Digital DOM will have more time to enjoy life !