Use cases for Robotic Process Automation(RPA) in Aviation

Industry 4.0 - is technology mature enough?

Use cases of Internet of Things(IoT) in Aviation

Basics of Flight - Essentials for an MRO ERP consultant

Unleashing Features of QCPs to Extend Oracle Complex MRO (Oracle CMRO)

The day to day activities in the production floor of an aircraft maintenance hangar involves carrying out inspections, compliance of AMS tasks, compliance of AD/SB, replacing of components, rectification of the defects etc.  Depending on the type of aircraft and based on the type of servicing required on the aircraft, various maintenance data has to be recorded along with the maintenance activities and communicated to the engineering and planners.  The requirement varies from customer to customer and requires an extensible solution to meet their requirements.

Oracle e-business suite application, Oracle Complex Maintenance Repair and Overhaul (cMRO) has a provision to attach Quality Collection Plans (QCP) to the production jobs to meet the requirements in the production floor.  Quality Collection Plans if used judiciously in Oracle CMRO will provide the production planners and the engineers a platform to introduce robust processes.

Here in this blog, I am explaining functionality introduced for a civil aircraft maintenance facility to capture data required for Structural Damage Repair Reporting using QCPs.  The structural damages on the aircraft like dents, buckles, minor cracks etc. are a monitored throughout its life span.  This data is maintained and the defects are reported to the Engineering and Quality Assurance departments when a temporary/ permanent repair is done to bring the damage with in an acceptable limit.  Required reports and a workflow were created to introduce an approval workflow process for the damage repairs.  The complete Structural Damage Repair Reporting process has been implemented using QCPs, BI publisher reports and Oracle Workflows.

The below screenshot shows the QCP developed for the technician to enter data while executing his task.  This QCP was attached to an operation which is added to the non-routine created for repair of the structural damage.

The advantage of the QCP is that we can add additional fields without any coding effort.  Also, the user can upload files against the QCP records.  The documents generated as a part of damage inspection like photographs, damage sketch etc. can be uploaded as an attachment to the QCP.

 We can trigger an approval workflow from the QCP action by setting the action as “Launch a Workflow”.  The below screenshot shows the steps to to setup the QCP to launch the workflow.

The WF process sets the approvers to a role and sends approval notification to the approvers.  Once approved by the approver, after uploading the necessary documents into the QCP the damage report is generated and forwarded to Engineering and Quality.

The workflow process is shown below.  

The below figure shows the notification received by the approver.

The notification received by engineering will have the damage report (BI publisher report) generated as an attachment.  Also the uploaded damage chart etc. will be attached to this notification which can be readily downloaded from the notification itself (no need to submit the concurrent program to generate a report manually)

The notification received by the engineering is shown below with the attached documents.

Also, I could get an OA framework page developed quickly by our OA guru to search for the structural damages.  The page is shown below:

The edit button will lead the user to the QCP edit screen in edit mode where the production planner can edit the data/ upload attachments to the QCP.

Reliability Centered Maintenance

The traditional method adopted for aircraft maintenance was based on flying hours of the aircraft. In 1974 the United States Department of Defence initiated efforts to analyze techniques to be used by airline industries to develop cost effective maintenance programs. And the result is a radically different approach to aircraft maintenance called 'Reliability Centred Maintenance'.

This new methodology resulted in huge cost savings for the airlines. Not only are these cost savings immense, but they were achieved with no decrease in safety or dispatch reliability. To the contrary, safety and reliability actually improved in almost every instance when emphasis shifted from scheduled retirement-overhaul-replacement to on-condition maintenance.

The OEMs are responsible to determine the TBO of the components or the engine as a part of certification process with the regulator. The TBO is calculated after rigorous testing and analysis of the components. However the modern structural and thermal analysis software’s can predict the life of the components to a great extend. The most widely used statistical technique for reliability prediction is Weibull analysis as it is the best suited method for failure prediction of mechanical components. The well-known "bathtub curve" depicts the failure pattern with a high risk of failure when the item is first placed in service ("infant mortality"), the useful life and followed by a second high-risk “Wear out zone” when the item exceeds its useful life.

The criticality of the failure of a component to probability of failure is studied using Hazard Risk Index (HRI) to determine the safe life of the component. The components are released for this safe life operation if the failure analysis proves that the type of failure is under the safe zone. The TBO is determined by the OEMs based on this analysis.

The maintenance organizations usually calculate the MTBUR of the component to schedule the maintenance activities and to calculate the float levels. But the accuracy of this calculation is largely dependent on the techniques used for data collection. The modern ERP systems provide a framework to collect data required for accurate reliability analysis. For more information on this, please refer the white paper published in box.net  accessible through the below link.

http://www.box.net/shared/0qq0z61rva/Reliability Whitepaper.pdf

This white paper details the the reliability analysis solution developed on top of Oracle’s ERP system (the solution was built on top of eBiz suite application Complex Maintenance Repair and Overhaul).

Oracle Complex MRO (cMRO) for a real Complex Aircraft MRO business