Background
A major Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) for aerospace and defense companies houses a library of over 5,700 component maintenance manuals that require consistent revisions. The revisions are based on fleet issue data and engineering developments. This library currently supports various in-service aircraft.
One of the critical business requirements for the project is to ensure that the manuals reach the air fleet promptly. It is worth noting that timely maintenance of aircraft is vital for defense capabilities and flight safety. Additionally, The contract for the maintenance of the library stipulates a 104-day service level agreement for the work and imposes financial penalties if the work is not completed within the agreed timeframe. Multiple suppliers both domestic and offshore, previously attempted to work the effort and have failed. The contractors missed the milestones, quality suffered, and the end customers were not happy. That’s where the OEM bought RCM Technology onboard.
The Challenge
RCM quickly identified why previous suppliers failed. With so many different milestones and various inputs required, the manuals were always in a constant cycle of starts and stops. This led to many of the updates getting lost in the revision life cycle. Once a single milestone was late, it caused others to be rushed in order to try and meet the original schedule.
The RCM Solution
The RCM Aerospace & Defense team swiftly identified and allocated the right resources and developed a new project execution plan. We productionized the effort. This method allowed our resources to focus on specific areas of the overall revision lifecycle. These areas consisted of an initial authoring team, customer and engineering contact coordinators, quality and metrics lead, final production team, and two overall project coordinators. We applied automation for all QA forms and status reporting. Custom triggers enabled us to ensure that nothing fell through the cracks. RCM is pleased to say that through these initiatives we were able to reduce the turnaround time for each revision by 52% compared to the contractual requirement that was previously often exceeded. Quality also drastically improved. The aerospace and defense companies that the OEM supports were very pleased.