Best Practices and Industry Trends in Lifecycle Asset Management: infoTRAK Supports Leaders in Aviation MRO and Component Repair

The Business Challenge

Commercial and military aircraft MRO facilities and component repair & overhaul facilities  must service a mixture of old and new equipment configurations, respond to unpredictable levels and sources of demand, minimize Turnaround Time (TAT), and maximize throughput for acceptable customer service. The increasing focus on more efficient asset MRO processes and end-to-end asset lifecycle management and reliability are key trends for industry leaders to gain marketshare and new levels of profitability in commercial environments, as well as attain increased military readiness at lower cost in Government environments.

While this commentary focuses on aircraft and component MRO, the business challenges and emerging best practices and solutions are broadly applicable to many different types of assets and components. Many of the same business challenges apply to ship and marine, transportation, and other types of assets or equipment that typically are large, expensive, highly engineered, possess long forecasted lifecycles and where safety, reliability and maintainability are of critical importance and often regulated.

In general, the term MRO refers to:

• Maintenance – Plans and service levels required to keep equipment in a serviceable condition.
• Repair – Unplanned or emergent work required to fix broken equipment, and bring non-serviceable equipment to a serviceable condition.
• Overhaul – Planned reconditioning and repair of equipment to bring it to the latest serviceable standard

In order to be successful, every commercial or Government operator must continually assure themselves, their customers, and their regulators that they are safe, compliant and reliable. Achieving such assurances over the entire lifecycle of an airplane or a major aircraft component requires these basic and fundamental capabilities:

• Rigorous maintenance program development, planning, scheduling and forecast management.
• Skillful execution of all work and skillful management of productive and often certified labor capacity.
• Precise documentation of actions taken and materials used for each asset’s or component’s configuration.
• Exact knowledge of the condition, performance, reliability, costs, and benefits for every action and step taken in a myriad of complex MRO processes.
• Efficient provisioning of repair parts and inventory.
• Management of asset information related to all of the above that can be readily produced for customers and regulators

While these long-standing requirements are fundamental, some facilities do better than others in managing specific segments of the value chain. Further, it is rare to find aircraft and component MRO facilities efficiently managing “their portion” of the end-to-end service lifecycle or efficiently managing the asset information for activities such as timely customer statusing, better planning, reliability, and maintainability management.

We find there are only a few leaders in the industry that are aggressively working towards managing the fundamentals more efficiently through the deployment of improved MRO processes enabled by innovative systems and technologies. The leaders are “nailing” the basics from end-to-end at the transactional level. But the leaders also have a clear strategy and plan for moving into higher levels of decision support capabilities for asset lifecycle management – either because their customers are starting to demand it, or they see it as a market differentiator and competitive advantage.

The Times They Are A-Changing

Until recent times, the conventional wisdom suggested that working hard and managing the “broke/fix it” cycle as an aircraft or component arrived was the only way. Many environments did not view their processes as repeatable and therefore processes remained largely manual and inefficient. If systems were used, they typically supported other selected areas of the business (e.g. manufacturing, finance, engineering etc). Or systems were antiquated, un-integrated, or worse, just a series of disparate Excel spreadsheets managed by individuals across the business.

Infospectrum’s infoTRAK Suite Addresses the Critical Business Issues

The infoTRAK suite combines proven commercial best practices with support for the unique challenges of the MRO environment by providing our customers with the information, planning and decision support tools, and MRO execution controls and visibility they need to speed asset turn-around while more effectively utilizing material, labor, and equipment resources.

The infoTRAK suite is modular that operates either standalone or integrates with your existing systems to support:

• Integrated Resource Planning, Capacity Management, Forecasting, and Schedule Optimizer to Reduce Turn-Around Time and Improve Availability of the Right Resources and Right Material.
• Real-time Integrated MRO Execution Management for Increased Throughput and Visibility across All End-to-End Processes including Connectivity/Statusing with Customers and Suppliers.
• Integrated Maintenance Engineering, Configuration Management and Audit Trails to Enable Efficient Failure Tracking, Engineering Order, Regulatory Compliance, and History Management.
• Quotation and Order Management, Project Cost Collection, Invoicing, and Finance Modules Provide Real-time Integration with Operations.
• Flexible User Interface that Adapts to the User and Job Function.