How to Save Costs in Aircraft Maintenance by Focusing on Data?

When thinking of aircraft maintenance costs, the quickest rationale is to take your costs for scheduled maintenance, add a margin for unscheduled maintenance costs divide it by 365 days, and there you have your Daily Maintenance Costs.  When the need arises to drive down these costs the focus mostly turns to what can be done to have lower scheduled maintenance costs.  Technical departments are reorganized, management layers are torn down and job roles are redefined seeking further optimization and efficiency.  

However, a factor frequently overlooked and potentially holding much potential is underlying process inefficiencies that originate from a lack of data integrity and data quality.  Data is driving every CAMO and MRO organization. Where it used to be paper-based, many organizations within the aviation industry have digitized most of the core business or are in the progress of full digitization.  Being digital is a big leap forward, but unfortunately not the magic potion that immediately solves all your problems and headaches.

 The effect of digitalization is that the company is increasingly (automatically) data-driven, but some of the data in the background driving the results might also have less immediate visibility. When the need arises to drive down these costs the focus mostly turns to what can be done to have lower scheduled maintenance costs. Lack of data integrity can be from the past when data has not been properly cleansed before it was digitized or can creep in naturally during normal working processes. It is always important to keep in mind that it exists and will need continuous monitoring and improvement to keep it at bay. As you might be aware, lacking data integrity and data quality can affect aircraft maintenance execution as well as continuous airworthiness management severely and result in it a lot of additional costs.

However, before we can say how we can save money we first need to be aware of the signs that indicate what does cost you money.

5 signs data is costing you money

1. Repeating issues/questions/workarounds

   The most important sign is quite simple, listen to your engineers and mechanics and their interactions.

   These discussions are a very valuable source of information and indicator if there might be underlying data issues. Repeated questions and/or issues regarding the statuses of aircraft, components, orders, etc. from the same group of people, indicate that there might be a data issue. If colleagues then start introducing or talking about workarounds or different methods of retrieving this then your normal process, all alarm bells should be ringing. 

   Your state-of-the-art M&E/MRO system is apparently not trusted or not providing expected data. This could lead to (expensive) and undetected mistakes on the aircraft, but more importantly, people are putting considerate time into investigating data and or even creating workarounds whereas this should be a simple output of the system.

    Consequence:

   People might feel they are understaffed and your hire additional resources to cope with the work. It can become a self-sustaining loop that brings a lot of unnecessary costs: the solution is at the source, find the cause, and fix the bad data.

2. Audit findings

   Audit findings can be small or severe, but they are not the most fun to deal with. Incidental findings will always exist and occur, however, as soon as findings become structural you know something is wrong. Data issues are one of the obvious culprits.

   Consequence:

   These findings could potentially slightly damage your reputation, can even result in aircraft groundings, and lead to unexpected short-term costs to rectify.

3. Standard Reports that take Days to Finish

   Things such as lease reports or reliability of the initial statistics, which are produced in a set interval and standardized way, should be relatively easy to produce. If these structurally take a long time to make, it should trigger you as a team leader to start investigating why.

   More often than not, you’ll find out that the required data is hard to acquire and/or incomplete, and people will double- or even triple-check because they’ve had issues in the past.

   Consequence:

   It is not uncommon that entire full-time functions are created, many unintentionally established over the years, for generating these reports. In turn, this generates unnecessary staff costs and, because it could be a dread, it’s impacting the motivation of your employees.

4. Backlog in Paperwork

   An increasing backlog in paperwork to be processed is also a tell-tale sign that you are incurring costs that can be prevented. Other than that the root cause of the backlog can be caused by data issues themselves, the overall problem is that more effort is created on the forecasting end of things.
   
   When an M&E/MRO system is not up-to-date, the maintenance forecast will also not be accurate and could demand additional work from your maintenance planners and engineers to find out the correct status by querying the dirty fingerprint work.

   Consequence:

   Planners and engineers are in a constant workaround to get an accurate picture of their maintenance forecast instead of letting the system provide them with that accuracy and do their core job of planning.

5. Component Tracking and Inventory

   As you know in aircraft maintenance a significant, but also delicate, part of the work is the tracking of aircraft components. It is paramount for both safety as well as costs that this is accurate, but reality dictates that unfortunately, this is a highly error-prone process.

   Unsurprisingly, as soon as you notice there are issues with the label booking administration, part requirement actuals, repair tracking, and/or inventory these are signs that it starts costing money as well. Components can be very costly and have a far-reaching effect on the airworthiness of the aircraft.

   Consequence:

   Next, to direct incurring costs by having to replace components or missing components, there are also the time/material costs of your staff to investigate all these cases and figure out the truth. This can go as far as having reinspected the aircraft to determine the correct components installed.

What can you do?

1. Keep looking out for signals in day-to-day activities with the above examples in mind. Data issues creep in over time and thus could be hard to detect on “face value” at first until it is far spread.

2. Clear procedures and workplace instruction, together with a “fool-proof” system are key to preventing data errors. Anything that can be interpreted multiple ways is a potential risk.

3. An open culture where people can report mistakes and with frequent internal data quality checks will help. Most importantly is that there is a culture where people immediately act on reported issues and try to correct and prevent them at its core, rather than think of a patch or workaround.

Using Technology

With NEXUS you can manage all your data in aircraft airworthiness critical processes. It is a software solution in conjunction with your MRO/M&E system landscape to manage, collect and exchange data, whilst retaining confidence in data quality and accuracy.

What can NEXUS do for you:

• Prepare and ingest aircraft data to have it all in one place and in the right format

• Conduct automated aircraft phase-ins

• Have full data validation and airworthiness consistency checks

• Have a backfill with OEM data

• Ensure industry and your operator standards are enforced across the whole dataset

• Be able to have continuous Data Health Checks

• Use self-service reports such as maintenance due forecast

• Have interfaces for automatic data exchange

• Use Robotic Process Automation for automatic data uploads and checks

Benefits

1. No need to hire additional resources to handle all the extra work

2. No aircraft groundings and unexpected costs due to data

3. No manual data correction and collection for reporting anymore

4. Directly having an accurate picture of the maintenance forecast

5. No doubts anymore about which components are installed on an aircraft

Result: Huge time and cost savings and even more important all airworthiness compliance data is fully and correctly available in the MRO/M&E software system.