2013. 13 major plane crashes, with a death toll as high as 600. What a year! Pitifully, similar statistics also attribute 70 percent of such hull-loss accidents to poor aircraft maintenance and miscellaneous human factors.

This might be a crazy way to start an article, but as India sprints forward to becoming the fifth largest player in the global aviation industry, it is important that we remember this and explore ways to make aviation safer and more reliable in the coming years, while also making it encouragingly profitable as a business. Much has been spoken about how IT can help an airline meet these contradicting objectives. But, has anybody told you that this can be done smoothly by empowering the airline/M&E/MRO employees with a ‘smart’ solution? Let us explore this off-beat but proven option.

Profit and Safety – Making the Twain Meet

The airline industry is one of the toughest to run.

The rising competition between low-cost airlines post 2000 is pushing airline operators to optimize costs wherever possible. Even with cost per passenger-mile numbers trickling down and margins soaring high, top low-cost carriers extend their mile run in finding new cost pockets to curb.

At the same time, there is responsibility, a scary amount of it although not many an operator would openly admit it. Imagine a year as bad as 2013, with so many accidents. The onus rests with the airline operators to avoid it. So, there is an overwhelming amount of maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO), documentation and compliance to handle, which turns out to be a costly affair.

Irrespective of the size, MRO and engineering of aircrafts are inherently challenging due to the complexity of aircrafts, their subsystems, the criticality of each component and the ongoing revisions from original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). It is a highly-skilled job done by a highly-paid technician! So, apart from managing the inventory costs and tracking the stages of completion of each maintenance task, it also becomes imperative to empower aircraft mechanics and optimize the time they spend on non-core jobs like documentation, so that they can be freed to work on critical jobs.

Trash Your Worries Using IT

So, what is the way out? For years, the aviation industry has understood that IT offers a way of optimizing operations. Yet, many airlines still suffer from the use of disparate point solutions, each generating a repository of redundant data, which often has no ‘meaning’. Surprisingly some operators even handle a few jobs manually and manage vast maintenance data in hundreds of excel spreadsheets! But with the kind of cut-throat competition that is there in the aviation industry today, using an excel sheet as a process optimization, productivity improvement tool will send you back to the stone ages. Offline models of track maintenance, managing safety and regulatory compliance manually using paper-work or spreadsheets, using disparate point solutions are all tools of the past century.

Faced with innumerable challenges, airline operators have started seeking and implementing cutting-edge solutions that will help them:

• automate maintenance & engineering operations
• usher in best practices to across departments
• augment resource optimization and profitability while also ensuring fleet safety and best-in-class customer service.

When we say cutting-edge, it means an end-to-end solution that is intuitive enough to understand the aviation maintenance business inside-out and has the ability and functionality to hand the ever-changing challenges in this industry. It also means a solution that is mobile, which can be carried in the pocket and used on the go whether by a pilot, an aircraft mechanic or by top management in the middle of a directors meeting. More than anything else, it also means a solution that is user-friendly and empathetic to the needs and hurries of the users, their habits, convenience and preferences, letting them customize and personalize seemingly simple things like the user interface they daily wake up to and keeping mouse and track pad travel at the very minimal, enabling them to get their work done swiftly, easily and stress free.

While the MRO solution providers are a large industry in their own right and are expected to grow to $4.5-5 billion in 2014, very few of the players actually understand the needs of the aviation industry, and some solutions could end up increasing your headache rather than curing it. But that doesn’t mean that everyone fails and many industry leaders like Boeing, Emirates, Airbus Helicopters, PHI, Columbia Helicopters, Republic Airways, FLTechnics, Air India, Astra airlines and 60 others have set a good precedent by adopting solutions from pioneers.

AIRBUS Helicopters for instance, has entered into a global partnership with Ramco Aviation, to offer Ramco’s Aviation Suite on cloud to several new and existing customers, unleashing the benefits of Mobility, Gen-Y Interfaces and WorkSpaces. The IT partnership will address the unique needs of smaller operators, MROs and CAMOs in tracking maintenance and airworthiness.

Columbia Helicopters took a similar bold step to increase efficiency, safety and profitability. The company decided that the next step towards the future was to implement a fully-integrated system across its shops, hangars, remote bases and all related functions; manage maintenance and inventory data of the remote bases that have limited or no network connectivity; and to manage the time and attendance of employees for job costing and payroll purposes.

Columbia Helicopters chose Ramco’s Aviation Solution, and configured it to implement end-to-end integration from maintenance and supply chain to finance and operations. The Offline Field Maintenance Solution (OFMS), a flagship Ramco solution enabled the remotely located crew to update critical maintenance information in field bases and auto sync all the data with the head office or nearest base. The time and attendance functions enabled the easy and accurate tracking of labor hours and cost, and the comprehensive contracts functions that are fully-integrated with all areas of the application enabled the MRO division to accurately track performance, customer inventory and billing of the work done.

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