Trend 1:

same enthusiasm of upgrading to newer fleet doesn’t trickle down to the backbone infrastructure. This inertia to resolve resides nowhere else but within the minds of every end user who puts up with it. It’s like driving to office on a 1908 Ford Model T although we are totally aware that it’s not fuel efficient, comfortable, earth friendly, etc.… As an operator or an MRO scales up operations, they still put up with the same legacy infrastructure, particularly the IT that governs people, process and equipment.

What is the result?

Soon a threshold is reached, and the voids in functionality, integration, data discrepancies surface like icebergs in the Indian Ocean (never spotted before). The MRO or the airline then sets up a committee to review all available new age IT systems that consumes anywhere from 3 weeks to 3 months.

A RFP is then floated and the team that sets out to solve the self-inflicted problems further debates any response to it. WHY? Even though IT can sort the problems out, the mindset of the people who end up using it fails to change.

In 2016, the problem arising out of disparate legacy systems and point solutions will peak forcing this mindset to change. It’s simple, when Google opened up Gmail to the world on Feb 7th 2007, a major chunk of the Yahoo mail and Hotmail users refused to migrate even though 1GB of space was promised.

Consolidation of IT will result in a single source of truth, weeding out all data silos to deliver exceptional clarity of maintenance operations – Change begins with the mind.

The consolidation of IT will also move beyond boundaries of individual enterprises and pave for a connected ecosystem, which will benefit all the players in the value chain from the OEMs to Marginal operators.

Trend 2:

Innovation has been buzz word in articles, blogs, media, and conference and more importantly in board rooms for some time now. With growing pressure on competition, margins and customer engagement innovation strategy is a no-brainer and in some cases only option for survival.

There is a statistic that says 86% of the board room members are convinced that innovation should be the corner stone of their strategy and interestingly enough there is a another statistic that says only 15 - 17% of those organization actually end up implementing these innovations.

The resistance so far has been due to a variety of reasons such as technology fluidity, change management issues, ever evolving standards, difficulty in business case articulation, internal departmental hurdles, High investment, risk of failure to name a few.

This year we will see a lot acceptance of the innovation strategy and we will see a lot more innovative solutions being rolled out at the hangar, Line station, Airport Bays and warehouses etc. Some of the lead indicators for this have been increasing success rate of proof-of-concepts with IOT / Wearables / Drones/ Mobility and some have reached technology maturity led by more Co-Innovation strategic partnerships to overcome internal hurdles, investment burdens and failure risks.

Current Innovations are around the areas of Aircraft Health Monitoring Systems, Predictive Maintenance (with the help of Big Data, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing etc), Robotics, Resource Optimization and adoption of wearable & mobility solutions.

Additionally, we see people investing in areas like Additive Manufacturing / 3D Printing, Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality aiding Mechanics and Technicians, UAVs, Composite Repair capabilities and New Repair Technologies leveraging huge amount of component performance and health data.

Trend 3:

A day in the life of mechanic or a storekeeper or a line foreman involves more paper work than the mail man who delivers your post. Let’s assume no maintenance work is carried out on an aircraft BUT, all the necessary personnel sign off on all the work package or release notes paperwork - The pilot will look for the signature during his preflight check and take it to the runway for takeoff – although no such misuse of paperwork is recorded in history, thus is the importance given to maintenance documentation.

IT systems today influence the organizations to go paperless without fully understanding the user experience, regulatory and security aspects of having maintenance documentation as dirty finger prints.

The mechanics are still reluctant to technical details on tablet simply because it neither easy or nor faster in comparison to writing in on paper and they spend more time on improving the quality of repair rather than data entry.

Paperless is inevitable , till IT vendors make data entry more faster and better, focus more than automated data collection than data entry, the dirty finger print will still remain.

Trend 4:

We started off on the World Wide Web back in the 80s and 90s using clunky desktops and work stations. The evolution of tech resulted in laptops which were still heavy to carry around. Then came the smartphone generation that resulted in ‘most of our lives going digital’ from sending emails, socializing, ordering a pizza or buying a furniture - all accomplished from the palm of our hand. It is a surprise then to notice end users top down in the maintenance organizations resort to 20 year old tech called the Workstation at the hangar, warehouse or the office to run their work.

Need to search for a part? Mechanic has to walk the entire 400 to 800 steps back and forth between the line and the hangar to use the workstation to search of part, documentation and new work orders. Storekeeper wants to respond to a parts request? He drops his stock taking routine in the far end zone of the warehouse and walks back to the workstation in the warehouse to check for part in the system and then issues it. Supervisor assigning work packages to mechanics? He raises it on his desktop and the mechanic has to wait till he gets on the work station to see what new work is assigned to him.

$3 - 3.5 Billion or 10% cost of all flight delays in 2014 were attributed to maintenance work.
Now imagine this: Supervisor at the MCC downloads the pilot’s recorded discrepancies from an app, creates the work order or package and pushes it to an app in the mechanic’s smartphone. Mechanic downloads the work package, searches for parts required for the work on his smartphone which is integrated to the entire M&E system including the warehouse. The storekeeper’s smartphone pinpoints which zone of the warehouse the part resides in for him to pick and issue immediately. The line runner delivers the part to the mechanic. The entire sequence from raising a discrepancy to walking to the aircraft with the right part, documentation and checklist all done by a series of apps that talk to each other on the smartphone, with little or no User specific Input

Trend 5:

Aviation maintenance planning has always been a complex process given multitude of variables such as maintenance parameters, flight schedules, operational constraints, safety regulations and material/ resource requirements. The complexity is not only on the one time computation but on the impact of disruptions on the overall planning. For e.g. Line stations run into 20 million disruptions per day as flight schedules changes can drastically impact parts requirements, ground staff’ roster schedule, ground support equipment availability, operational plan. The current processes and system are in no way geared to handle this complexity and this is obvious with airlines loosing 25 billion USD every year due to delays. 

Traditional systems run on linear programming and they will no longer cut the ice due to its inefficiency in computational time and ability to handle real time disruption. On the other hand, the algorithmic solution use new age algorithms and optimization platform like multi-agent simulated annealing, R-programing that provide ability to enable real time with in –memory planning option Aviation industry especially the airlines realize this is an area that will offer significant business benefits and you will see a lot acceptance, evaluation/ proof- of concepts happening with regards to algorithmic planning especially in Line Maintenance and Hangar Operations.

• New age data visualization would become the norm
• Cognitive Applications will find its ways
• Virtual Reality /Augmented Reality is about to go mainstream
• On-premise installation will still be preferred over Cloud deployment
• Bi-directional data flow between OEM and Operators will become a standard
• High investment in Self Service Business Intelligence and Big data analysis will occur

In summary, it will be a challenging year for Aviation MRO organizations with increased OEM competition, New-Gen aircraft capability requirements, severe labor shortages and market consolidation. Organizations that can adopt IP based service differentiation, embrace disruptive technology innovations and focus on operational efficiencies will smoothly ride the wave of 2016.

About the Authors:

Dr. Franz Josef Weiper
Chief consultant, In-memory planning & optimization, Ramco Systems
Franz Josef is the key member of driving our iPO engine & optimization approach in Ramco. He comes with more than 15 years of experience in Development and Solution Architecture for Advanced Planning & Optimization Solutions in various industry areas. In addition he currently holds a position as Professor of Logistics IT at the University of Applied Science, Cologne.

R.H. Chalapathy B.E. M.B.A, CPIM, CIRM, PRINCE 2, PgMP
Global head of Strategy, Aviation practice, Ramco Systems

R.H. Chalapathy a.k.a Chala after successfully establishing the business consulting division in Asia pacific for manufacturing and Aviation MRO Software industry segments for Ramco. Chala has implemented & consulted for projects across a variety of industries as Airlines, Airports, Aviation MRO, Maritime, Manufacturing and Logistics. Holding the world renowned APICS certification (CPIM/CIRM), PMI Certification (PgMP) and he is part of an exclusive club of 1000 certified professionals worldwide.