Automation of airline technical publication management: Real-life use case of RPA in aircraft engineering
As airline fleets will shrink and budgets will get cut in the months to come, engineering managers will be faced with the reality of managing their core-CAMO business processes to safeguard airworthiness as well as implement cost saving initiatives. One such area of direct return, will be the automation of back-office processes that form part of the CAMO process chain. Have you ever thought of fully automating your technical publication management with the help of RPA? Well-read here how this is already implemented by EXSYN with another airline
For example, covering the handling of OEM documents (SB's) and Authority publications (AD's)
OEM’s regularly publish technical information on their portals. The technical engineering support is tasked to screen all applicable portals for new publications and download if applicable. Any new OEM publication needs to be manually entered in the airline’s MRO software system for further processing and assessment. For many airlines this does not only involve monitoring one portal but many. This task is highly repetitive, manually driven and often also boring for the engineers. Next to that, it is also prone to error as much information needs to be entered into the MRO software system manually.
Here is where RPA can come in:
RPA is a technology that can be seen as a ‘software’ robot. This robot mimics the actions a human employee would do and does so in the same user interface of the system. Think of data entry into an M&E system, archiving of files or downloading data. These automated actions can even string up to a full end-to-end business process. These 'software' robots are trained for their tasks with the same instructions that are used for a human employee counterpart and every 'software' robot also has its own workstation. Instead of a physical station, it is a virtual one. In these virtual environments they ‘read’ the screen electronically.
For one of our airline clients we have developed a software robot that automatically monitors different OEM portals and processes applicable published documents. The software robot:
Scans the different OEM portals continuously
If it detects a new document,
The software robot downloads the document,
Reads the content,
Next it enters the applicable information in the MRO software system publication management module
Finally, it distributes the information to the required system engineer for further evaluation
Some of the Benefits:
Higher Efficiency and Performance: Software robots can handle large data volume from multiple locations providing enhanced performance and increase efficiency as no assessment time lost on OEM documents.
Greater Compliance: With the reduced risk data entry errors in the airline technical applications and ability to diligently follow the regulatory norms, regulatory violations and fraudulent transactions are reduced.
Increased Employee Satisfaction: By eliminating the chores of downloading and entering all data manually from various portals, employees can devote their time for more creative and innovative tasks.
Time and cost savings: It can even significantly save FTEs and labour cost. But also saving up of manpower to focus on value added tasks to increase operational benefits.
The good news is; A RPA proof-of-concept can be accomplished within a few weeks without impacting the existing IT infrastructure. It is a one-time investment with a long term effect on costs reduction and even employee work satisfaction as a side effect.
How to get started?
EXSYN' Team of aviation and IT experts utilize a proven framework and methodology for identifying the right processes that can be automated and to build the software robots itself. The steps we conduct include:
Companywide process scan to identify the opportunity in your business
Develop the implementation strategy
Set up a proof of concept
Create the software robots
Implement the strategy and software robots
Maintenance of software robots
