A maintenance production tool for support equipment lifecycle management

Aircraft maintenance managers encounter significant pressure to maintain the operational readiness of their aircraft fleet. In the commercial domain, the demands result from financial pressure to remain competitive with peers. In the military domain, maintenance managers must meet operational targets to achieve mission success. For daily operations, many managers use printed tabular sheets or manually updated spreadsheets to track aircraft and support equipment status. While this affords expediency to the maintenance managers, the approach limits the immediate communication of status changes to other levels of supervision and to others in the organization who have interest in the information. The status sheet runs the risk of being lost or being annotated inadvertently. This tracking method adds additional time to the overall maintenance production process because subordinate staff have to exchange the information with the maintenance manager. The approach discards information because the documentation is destroyed daily or as needed. Improvements to maintenance production could benefit from this data, or the maintenance manager could use the information to identify trends in the fleet. This research describes the initial considerations in developing a maintenance production tool for tracking the status of support equipment. The tool uses a web service architecture to enable either a closed or networked system topology. The system tracks individual items by their part numbers. Reported information for the support equipment includes quantity status (availability and required amount), problem reports, safety violations, etc. The tool provides the ability to identify obsolescence of the items and to plan for future investments to mitigate against deficiencies in the equipment. A method to numerically aggregate the issues allows the maintenance manager and management to use the data to analytically rank the support equipment, which most severely affects the maintenance production. The flexible framework with which the tool was developed will allow for extensions to support other facets of maintenance production. Future work could include integration with the tracking process for individual aircraft to monitor the configuration and status. As the data for the support equipment will be consolidated in one location, the trend based and predictive health maintenance analysis of the assets will be possible.