Join us as we start our three-part blog on MROs’ challenges and how Flatirons Solutions can help you achieve optimal maintenance performance. Part one begins below.
Introduction:
Successful aerospace MROs have quickly adopted digitization to optimize performance, increase profitability, and restore growth to pre-Covid levels. These progressive MRO businesses understand that the ability to manage time-dependent, mission-critical content and information has a significant impact on turn times, labor productivity, and shop floor/hangar asset utilization.
The Challenge:
One of the most significant challenges in the aviation sector has always been managing exponentially larger volumes of data from various sources, including manuals, libraries, and engineering orders, to name a few, in both S1000D and ATA iSpec 2200 formats. MROs, in particular, have difficulty juggling all of the latest information needed to manage their repair operations.
So how do you handle the plethora of data that bombards typical MRO organizations daily? Best practices recommend implementing an interactive electronic viewing solution that results in substantial productivity improvements, which is particularly valuable when labor shortages create considerable challenges. And to top this off, according to many recent reports, an upcoming wave of maintenance workers’ retirements will result in a significant shortfall in skilled personnel over the next five years.
The Solution: Put the Data You Need Right at Your Fingertips
How can you overcome the challenge of achieving optimal maintenance performance? As your customers look for faster turnaround times for maintaining their aircraft, how can MROs improve their productivity? The answer is simple—put content in the hands of technicians at the point of maintenance.
With Flatirons Pinpoint, you always deliver the right information at the right time to the right people. By empowering your maintenance and engineering teams to access the most up-to-date content in real-time, you can drive your end users to the specific content they need with greater speed. And by streamlining access by creating custom libraries, folders, and sub-folders, your data becomes organized. You can reorder fleets and manuals within a library and rename folders and publications. Or create shortcuts to related publications and display common publications in multiple libraries without duplication.
What could be more efficient and cost-effective than a single viewer to access and navigate data across multiple fleets, manufacturers, components, and document types? Pinpoint provides all the intelligence your technicians need by consolidating and simplifying access to online and offline technical content onto a single platform. This allows you to deliver the latest technical content and manuals from OEMs, suppliers, and customers and process technical content in various formats (SGML, XML, etc.) and non-standardized content (Word, PDF, etc.). And because Flatirons has been an industry leader for over 25 years, we have evolved our platform to support both legacy and next-generation information exchange standards like ATA iSpec 2200 and S1000D.
There is no need for additional investment; with Pinpoint, you can utilize your current hardware to display on any platform: desktop, kiosk, laptop, or mobile device running iOS, Android, or Windows in a cloud-hosted, stand-alone, or multi-server deployment environment. You can bring everything together to save even more time and money by eliminating multiple daily logins, thereby reducing the IT expense of supporting various airframe and engine OEM proprietary systems.
Freeze Document Revisions Required for the Maintenance Visit
As an MRO, you have unique document management requirements. Flatirons understand your needs, and that’s why we’ve developed solutions to ensure compliance. Only providing access to manuals and procedures “locked in” at appropriate revision levels gives you one less thing to worry about as the assets progress through the entire maintenance and repair process. In addition, with Pinpoint, you can comply with maintenance requirements by building pre-defined electronic libraries ahead of a visit that only contains the sets of manuals configured to the appropriate revision levels that technicians will use on an aircraft, engine, component, or asset during the current maintenance event.
Be proactive to ensure safety, compliance, and efficiency:
- Define the default manual revisions visible to an organizationBuild “Transmittal Libraries” pre-populated with appropriate manual and revision combinations
- Freeze each manual in every Transmittal Library (AMM, AIPC, EM, EIPC, CMM, etc..) to the appropriate revision level required to complete a maintenance event
- Further enhance compliance with our Access Control Manager (ACM) module to limit a technician’s access to only the specific manual revisions appropriate to ensure that a maintenance event is performed correctly
Do More with Flatirons
The world’s largest airlines and MRO repair stations use the Flatirons Technical Content Management platform to manage their end-to-end content lifecycle of technical manuals, libraries, engineering orders, service bulletins, task cards, and visit packages. Shouldn’t you? Contact us to learn more about the Flatirons platform at [email protected].
Come back and visit us for our continuing blog series that addresses MRO challenges.
Up Next: We take a deep dive into Flatirons Pinpoint productivity-boosting features used to enrich technical data with in-line editing, expanding embedded references, adding annotations, and taking advantage of streamlined searching.
