Harnessing Data and Technology: A Solution to Addressing Current Challenges in the Aviation Industry

In the aviation industry staying ahead of disruptive challenges is crucial for sustained success. To gain insights into the market Oliver Wyman conducts an annual MRO survey among airline and MRO employees. Amongst others, participants are asked about the major disruptors in the coming five years. The top three key concerns are:

1. Labor/Material cost management
2. Maintenance Technician labor shortage
3. Changes to fleet plans/strategies

Fortunately, data and technology offer valuable tools to address these challenges effectively as we will outline in today’s article.

Using Data to Optimize Operations

Harnessing the power of data can yield numerous benefits. By employing data-driven insights, airlines, and MROs can make informed decisions that result in cost savings and operational efficiencies:

• Using data to optimize staff planning in aircraft maintenance, airlines can ensure that they have the right personnel in the right place at the right time, which can help reduce the impact of labour shortages.
• Predictive Maintenance: By using sensor readings and statistical modeling data, airlines can predict when maintenance will be needed and schedule the appropriate workforce to perform the maintenance at the right time. By using data and identifying components that might fail, airlines will be going from unplanned maintenance to planned maintenance that will avoid AOG (aircraft-on-ground) and unplanned work and reduce associated costs.
• Maintenance History Analysis: By analyzing data on past maintenance activities, airlines can identify patterns and trends that can help to predict future maintenance needs and costs.
• Cost Analysis: By analyzing data on labor, materials, and fuel costs, airlines can identify areas where costs are higher than expected and take steps to reduce them.
• Supply Chain Optimization: By analyzing data on supplier performance, buying behavior, and inventory movements, airlines can identify potential cost savings in their supply chain, such as negotiating better prices with suppliers or reducing inventory levels.
• Real-time tracking: By having real-time data on the location and availability of staff, airlines can better manage and deploy their workforce.
• Certification and skill tracking: By having data on the certifications and skills of staff, airlines can ensure they have the right personnel with the appropriate qualifications working on a specific aircraft or task.
• Automated scheduling: By using data and algorithms to automatically schedule staff, airlines can reduce the time and effort required to manage the workforce, which in turn can help to avoid errors and oversights.

However, to make this work you need to make sure all data in the MRO/M&E system is correct and up to date, is the only source of truth, and has no additional workarounds or Excel sheets next to the system.

Maximizing Data Utilization

To fully harness the potential of data in addressing industry disruptors, it is essential to establish a strong foundation for data management. The following steps are crucial:

• Determine whether all necessary data resides in a single system or if it is scattered across multiple systems. Connecting and integrating these systems facilitates seamless data exchange and analysis.
• Identify and minimize the use of additional Excel sheets or workarounds alongside the primary MRO/M&E system. A single source of truth ensures data accuracy and eliminates redundancies.
• Implement regular data quality checks to validate the consistency and accuracy of data. This includes verifying that aircraft cycles match those in the MRO/M&E system and reviewing audit findings for any discrepancies.
• Establish interfaces between various systems, such as finance, MRO/M&E, and supply chain, to enable smooth communication and data sharing. Interfacing systems provide a comprehensive overview and facilitate informed decision-making.

Harness the power of technology for fleet changes

In general, welcoming new aircraft to the fleet is overall a moment of joy. It enables new routes, more frequencies, cost efficiency, and better customer experience. However, for the engineering team, it is a moment of stress, hard work, and a lot of data to process. It means managing resources between ongoing operations and one-of-project phase-ins. It can even constrain the revenue growth of the airline if something is not going as planned albeit all airworthiness data needs to be available in the system to manage the aircraft and be operational. Time is money and manual data entry not only costs lots of time but is human error sensitive as well. The format and completeness of data also vary according to aircraft type, which might affect timeliness.

Technology can help:

• Setting up a system for a new aircraft type is a tedious process. New maintenance programs, new parts, new modifications, publications, and so on need to be added to the system. Some might already be present on which applicability needs to be updated, other data might need to be set up from scratch. Robotic process automation scrapers can help to download full modification packages from the authority and OEM portals, to be automatically processed and loaded into the MRO/M&E system. 75% of the information is prefilled and the engineers can focus their skills and expertise on perfecting the data instead of sourcing and copying it.
• If an aircraft is coming from another operator, automatic consistency analysis can help to verify that all the required data is complete. It speeds up the process of a first data scan significantly, from weeks to 1 or 2 days. Making the process of accepting and requiring the data with the previous operator/owner much more efficient.
• ?Bulk uploading data into an already populated MRO//M&E software system can be complex and, depending on the system, even not (entirely) possible. During the phase-in of aircraft, multiple technical areas will need to be covered with interdependencies between them. By using ETL, RPA technology one can automate the data entry into any system, even if there is no direct support for bulk data entry. It will execute the data loading in the correct sequence and ensure data consistency throughout.

Technology can help to significantly speed up the process and enhance the overall data quality, allowing the actual engineers to focus on the important details instead of bulk processing.

Example

Software solutions tailored to the airline maintenance industry provide efficient means to manage data and unlock its value. For instance, solutions EXSYN solutions NEXUS and AVILYTIVS empower engineering teams to automate critical processes and ensure compliance. They bridge the gap between airworthiness management, data, and IT and save valuable time & costs.

It includes functions such as:

?Automated aircraft phase-ins

?Automated technical fleet reliability reports

?AOG risk monitoring

?Automated data validation and airworthiness consistency checks

?Conducting continuous data health checks

?Self-service reports such as maintenance due forecast

?Interfaces for automatic data exchange

For a live demo of our software solutions and to talk with our experts about how to become a leader in aircraft data management and tackle the current challenges you can also meet us at the Airline & Aerospace MRO & Flight Operations IT Conference – EMEA on 13-14 June 2023 and visit EXSYN at Booth E3.

Our colleagues? Robert Alexander Vermeij ?and? Sander de Bree ?would be happy to meet you and show you how our software solutions can help you in person.