Austrian, Zoom and the data challenge

Bankruptcies, mergers, and acquisitions such as Zoom, Iberia and Austrian prove the need for enterprise asset management (EAM) and maintenance repair and overhaul (MRO) systems to be more than just effective, they also need to be virtually portable and a source of competitive advantage.

Looking at a friendly move such as the proposed alliances at Austrian gives some idea of the challenge. According to Austrian's current website, the group is flying about a dozen types different types including Airbus 321 / 320 / 319, Boeing 777 / 767 / 737, Fokker 100 / 70, Bombardier Q400 / Q300 and Canadair across a fleet of almost 100 aircraft. Most likely some of these aircraft are heavily dependent on outside maintenance providers, some of the powerplants may be running on a power by the hour basis some not, some aircraft or major components will have real time performance monitoring and data transfer and others may have little support technology behind them.

All of this adds up to a very normal situation where the data concerning the main operating assets are held in multiple databases, many of which are not connected and some may be outwith the company's ability to easily access

One of several suitors, most probably Lufthansa will have to integrate the Austrian operation into their own and generate worthwhile operational savings to help justify the investment. The lifecycle cost of managing the fleet will need to find a significant contribution to those savings. Whoever can manage that integration most effectively find and exploit savings in key areas will be able to build the most convincing business case and create the clearest competitive advantage.

This brings the portability of not only the data, but the data management processes themselves into the front line of business decision making at the corporate level as well as operationally.

Who will select your next EAM or MRO IT system?

One of the constraints holding back the adoption of new IT tools in managing aviation assets seems to be the way that previous systems were selected and deployed. Selecting Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and Maintenance Repair and Overhaul (MRO) systems usually took a huge amount of time and effort from across the organization, but once the software was in place, it was invariably down to front line managers in Operations to make it work.

This meant that once a system went live Operations management often had to make their practices fit the software and frequently find work-around solutions to bridge gaps on what the system really should be doing. Having to find a system that fitted the requirements of both Operations and the IT department was a major reason for this compromise, but this may now be changing for two reasons.

First, the role of the CIO seems to be changing. The IT gurus at Gartner Consulting carried out their “CIO Agenda” review for 2008 and make the claim from their findings of over 1,400 CIO interviews that the role of IT will become overwhelmingly about delivering business value rather than simply looking after the technology side. Supporting this is the fact that the priority for “creating new products or services” has gone from last year’s number 10 priority to number 3 this year.

So does that mean that IT departments will actually take on more authority for selecting systems such as MRO and EAM software? Not according to Gartner who in another report concerning future trends claim that as technology develops and becomes more ubiquitous it actually becomes more accessible to non-IT users narrowing down the great technological cloud of unknowing that only the IT department could comprehend. This is something they call the “consumerization of IT”.

So according to the experts, it looks as though how we select IT systems for future Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), Configuration Management and Maintenance Repair and Overhaul (MRO)requirements will be a lot more user friendly and our IT departments a lot more business value focused than in the past.