Is Predictive Maintenance On Your Agenda?

Over the last several years data generated by aircraft has increased exponentially through the introduction of new onboard equipment that allows for the so-called connected aircraft. In the wake of this data growth, OEMs and airlines alike the interest in data analytics and predictive maintenance has risen alike.

Let’s Start At The Beginning What is Predictive Maintenance?

Predictive maintenance involves the use of information such as sensor data, and statistical modeling to calculate what the condition of systems and components could be at a given moment in time to predict maintenance needs in advance. It helps airlines to determine when maintenance should be performed.

What Is The Aim Of Predictive Maintenance?

Within aviation maintenance and engineering the aim of predictive maintenance is first to predict when a component failure might occur, and secondly, to prevent the occurrence of the failure by performing maintenance. Monitoring for future failure allows maintenance to be planned before the failure occurs, thus reducing unscheduled removals and avoiding AOG.

Benefits Of Applying Predictive Maintenance

Improve operations:

• forecast inventory
• manage resources

Reduce costs:

• minimizing the time, the equipment is being maintained
• minimizing the production hours lost to maintenance, and
• minimizing the cost of spare parts and supplies.

However, before airlines can really benefit from predictive maintenance we need to focus on one rather important point here namely data quality and data standardization!

Probably you are familiar with the term garbage in garbage out – you cannot drive value from data and make the right decisions on flawed data. Hence, before starting with predictive maintenance you need to work on your data.

But the question is, where to start? If you have been using your MRO/M&E system for let’s say 10 years and have a fleet of around 50 aircraft tons of terabytes of data reside in the MRO/M&E system and every day more data is added to the system. It can be like facing the basement in your house or your storage where you have added stuff every day for the last 10 years and now is the time to clean it up, organize, and label everything so that you know what you have and can find it back easily when you need it.

Having your data organized, cleansed, labeled, identifying, and filling the gaps is needed for predictive maintenance, your digitization strategy, and airworthiness compliance.

There Are Always Multiple Reasons For ‘Poor’ Data Quality. However, These Are The Top 3:

1. During the introduction of an MRO/M&E system, data was never cleaned properly, implicating problems from the beginning as the source was never correct as well. Or after using a system for quite some years regular data checks do not take place.
2. 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 MRO/M&E system making it unreliable or, at best, giving slight concerns to the user base.
3. 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 things are often put away as 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 labour 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 these examples during our work in the field.

Ask Yourself

We would like to invite you to ask yourself the following questions:

1. How long ago was the implementation of your current MRO software?

a) Less than 5 years ago

b) More than 5 years ago

2. Do you conduct regular data scans/checks, at least once a year?

a) Yes

b) No

3. How often do you find yourself double-checking something from your own system?

a) Never

b) Quite often

4. Do you avoid double entries of data?

a) Yes

b) No

5. Are people doing multiple things in the system outside of their original scope/function

a) No

b) Yes

6. How many component serial number readouts per aircraft per year do you have due to doubts in the system?

a) Less than 10

b) More than 10

If you have mainly chosen answer a, then you are on the right track. Keep up the good work! With this level of data quality, you might want to start looking into enabling more value from your aircraft data set by looking into advanced analytics and predictive analytics.

If you mainly have chosen answer b, it might be time to start addressing some of the core issues. Of course, you still operate within allowable boundaries of airworthiness management, however, as your aircraft data will further grow so will the potential risks of the impact of this aircraft data quality on critical airworthiness items.

Customer Example

When one of the world’s largest helicopter operators knew that the data residing in their MRO/M&E software system led to the grounding of aircraft, they turned to EXSYN. We conducted a full data health analysis of the MRO software system to identify current deficiencies, gaps, and issues arising out of data avoiding future groundings.

Situation?

The helicopter operator is using its current MRO/M&E 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.

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

Benefits

• Reduce the risk of Non-compliance; All airworthiness compliance data is fully and correctly available in the MRO software system.?
• An understandable dashboard per aircraft shows where the most urgent issues require immediate attention.?
• Next to the dashboard a detailed report per aircraft registration allows engineering staff a full overview of all data issues per helicopter and determines the required action.?
• All gaps and deficiencies have been identified and can be eliminated to avoid future groundings and penalties. Additionally, manual workarounds were eliminated that caused inconsistencies in the data and as such reduced total costs of ownership.