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Realization Announces New Solution to Speed Overnight Aircraft Checks

Dépèche transmise le 26 mars 2012 par Business Wire

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Realization, a premium provider of Real Time Synchronization solutions for project execution, today unveiled a new Line Maintenance Management Solution for aviation organizations that has already proven itself with a major U.S. Airline. During the summer of 2011, that airline reduced flight cancellations by 62 percent, resulting in 1,650 fewer cancellations compared to the same period in 2010 and adding tens of millions of dollars to the airline’s bottom line. Realization’s Line Maintenance Solution is now generally available for commercial and military aviation operations worldwide.

On the runway, airlines and military aviation organizations face a daunting task. High uncertainty, strict deadlines and intense competition are the rule. Projects must be finished in a single eight-to-10-hour shift. Even worse, maintenance personnel do not know which tasks will need to be completed until two hours prior to each shift, and nearly half of the work is non-routine, requiring the shipping of parts from across the country in less than a single day. In addition, project deadlines are inflexible, delays can cost $10,000 to $150,000 per aircraft per day, and missed deadlines can create hundreds of unhappy, stranded customers.

On the line, maintenance crews face two types of work:

• Scheduled maintenance: These are regular, ongoing items that must be completed within a certain timeframe. If not, regulations require that the aircraft go out of service until they are completed.
• Unscheduled maintenance: Through regular usage, planes often require unplanned maintenance to address urgent repairs. The line crew must evaluate whether the item can be repaired on the line, whether parts are available, and if not, whether parts can be swapped in from another plane without affecting flight schedules.

Line maintenance organizations face many challenges, but Realization has found two large problems in particular that slow execution. The first is that crews often cannot prioritize their work because all tasks are labeled “urgent,” and as a result, individuals multi-task excessively. The second problem is that parts are not available when and where they are needed. In fact, a study conducted by Realization showed that two-thirds of all aircraft out-of-service hours were due to parts shortages.

The first part of Realization’s solution includes increasing a metric called Time-Control Health, which is the average amount of time allotted to aircraft before being put out of service due to unfinished scheduled maintenance items.. Realization strictly limits the number of planes receiving maintenance during any given day to reduce work in progress. In addition, it requires that teams have all parts necessary to complete each task before starting work, which allows maintenance teams to actually complete all work on planes with fewer than 15 days of “healthy” status.

Realization also changes how local teams measure their work. Instead of tracking each team’s completed maintenance tasks, airlines instead track how many planes are “healthy,” meaning those planes that completely up to date on all scheduled maintenance tasks. This focuses everyone on those tasks that will keep planes from going out of service instead of on the sheer number of tasks completed, regardless of how important they may actually be at the moment.

Finally, Realization synchronizes the work of all departments so they focus on increasing Time-Control Health and producing “clean” aircraft.

On the parts side, Realization found through experience that local managers forecast stock levels for parts based on historical usage and then over-react to parts shortages by overstocking that part. As a result, stock levels became imbalanced and, if a plane needed a part in a location that had not previously experienced that kind of repair, parts were unavailable and slow to arrive.

To counteract this problem, Realization’s Line Maintenance Solution puts all excess parts inventory in a central warehouse and requires that all maintenance locations stock a minimum number of all parts used by the airline within the past year. For one major U.S. airline, the number of hours that aircraft were out of service due to parts shortages declined by 26.7 percent.

The Line Maintenance Management Solution is now available for all aviation organizations. For more information, please visit http://www.realization.com/mro-turnarounds.html.

About Realization

Realization helps organizations do projects 20 to 50 percent faster by replacing “fixed schedules,” which cannot be followed when ground conditions keep changing, with Real-Time Synchronization, a complete solution of software and services. Realization's more than 200 clients include organizations like ABB, Amdocs, BHP Billiton, Dr. Reddy's, L&T, Medtronic, NASA and the U.S. Air Force. Collectively Realization's clients have realized $3.5 billion in additional cash and profits by doing projects faster. Realization is headquartered in San Jose, California, with partners in India, France, Spain, Brazil, Japan, and South Africa. For more information, visit www.realization.com.