As the aerospace industry looks to improve its maintenance operations, one airline, Iberia Airlines of Spain, is adopting a technology that allows it to reduce costs at more than 100 airports around the globe. The new technology, Enigma 3C, generates custom job cards with up-to-the-minute maintenance and repair information and has been rolled out to thousands of mechanics, maintenance planners and engineers.
Burlington, Mass.-based Enigma, Inc. worked with IBM Global Business Services to integrate Iberia's existing systems. Iberia maintains its own fleet, as well as the aircraft of 48 other companies.
Maintenance job cards, which often exceed 1000 pages, define the tasks and workflow of the aircraft maintenance technicians. Iberia uses the new system to dynamically generate custom job cards that not only indicate maintenance tasks, but also include all relevant maintenance information for the specific aircraft being serviced. For the maintenance planning department, this has decreased the time needed to produce job cards by 80%, according to Enigma.
"Maintenance is a critical function for Iberia, both in terms of safety and revenue, and they are always looking for new ways to improve the process while continuing to provide the high level of service that their customers have come to expect," said Juan Carlos Snchez Rosado of IBM Global Business Services. "The challenge is to find an effective way to equip the technicians with the detailed information they need to carry out each maintenance assignment.
Enigma's 3C Platform, which is built on an open, Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) n-tier based architecture, integrates with Iberia's maintenance planning and content management systems. Enigma extracts maintenance and execution information from these applications and generates a comprehensive job card that includes all the references, equipment, tools, codes and other vital instructions necessary to perform a specific maintenance procedure. Enigma significantly reduces the time and cost incurred by Iberia as it carries out more than 50 C-checks (heavy maintenance) each year.
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