The Background: A major OEM with a library of over 5700 component maintenance manuals supporting various in-service aircraft constantly requires revisions derived from fleet issues and engineering data evolutions.
The manuals must reach the fleet in a timely manner. Contractual requirements regarding financial penalties that can be imposed if the work is not executed within 104 days. Multiple suppliers (domestic and offshore) previously attempted to unsuccessfully work the effort. Milestones were missed, quality suffered, and the end-customers were not happy. Then they bought onboard RCM.
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 Solution: RCM 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 OEM’s customers were very pleased.
