Prepare Maintenance Visit

General

This process handles the preparation for a heavy maintenance visit. Preparing a maintenance visit allows:

• Both service providers and operators to agree on the primary event codes to be assigned to the maintenance visit, upfront.
• Optimized packaging of visit contents.
• Inclusion of all maintenance, overhaul and repair requirements, i.e., interval maintenance, life limited part (LLP) replacements, Out of Phase (OOP) component inspections, Service Bulletins (SBs) etc, into the package.
• Scoping of the work content based on predefined maintenance event code and task card relationships and a dynamic grouping and arranging criteria to determine and create visit structures based on execution logic templates.

Benefits

Following are some of the benefits provided by the capabilities within the Prepare Maintenance Visit process:

• The usage of execution logic templates to dynamically group and arrange the contents of a visit greatly reduces the planning time needed to determine the most appropriate arrangement of event contents.
• As most maintenance visits comprise different combinations of event codes based on operator, authority and asset requirements, arranging of the contents according to a fixed set of criteria ensures that planners get a good understanding of the content and duration of the work package without having to spend a large number of hours ensuring that the task cards are arranged and grouped 100% correctly.
• As the contents of the visits are firmed up planners can adjust the arrangement, sequence and grouping of the visit in order to achieve the most optimum throughput through the maintenance facility.
• Resource and material needs can be forward planned ensuring that the required items are available when needed during the execution of the visit.

Define Maintenance Visit

For most service orientated businesses, a rough idea of the workload for the business over the year is a good indication of how effective the business is or can be operated. To facilitate this, it is possible to enter a number of maintenance slots which represent potential opportunities for when an asset could pass through the maintenance facility for a variety of maintenance activities. During the initial phase of this planning, the facility manager will review the capacity of the facility in terms of which assets can be supported (size-wise and according to the approved capability of the facility), the available resource hours, any facility downtime (maintenance, shutdown etc) and the target budget for the year. The registration of maintenance slots allow facility planners to register potential maintenance visits long before the actual visit is due to take place. This improves the planning of the throughput through a facility.

Once the manager has identified these slots, further negotiation between the service provider and any operators can occur. Often maintenance facility managers will also reserve slots for opportunistic visit requirements, specifically in the Defense domain, where heavy maintenance providers also support repair activities for damaged assets. Opportunistic visits could also occur in Civil Aviation domains where operators have the option of using various service providers which have the approved capability to support the asset, as such facility managers also bear these requirements in mind when planning the load within their facilities.

In many instances when the visit is being negotiated between the service provider and operator, a broad understanding of the basic type of maintenance event which will be required to be performed when the asset enters the maintenance facility is known, for instance, D-Check.

Plan Maintenance Visit

As the planning process continues to firm-up, confirmation of the real maintenance requirements of the asset are confirmed and agreed between the service provider and operator. This process relies on a vast quantity of information being available in Fleet and Asset Management before the full contents of the visit can be firmed up. If the asset is not fully maintained using Fleet and Asset Management capabilities, which could occur in instances where the service provider uses IFS Applications but the operator uses their own forward/at asset maintenance application, a vast quantity of information must be available in Fleet and Asset Management before the full contents of the visit can be firmed up. However, even if the service provider and the operator share information, in the same instance of IFS Applications, it may be required of the service provider to add and enhance the contents of details pertaining to event codes, task cards and configuration.

As a minimum the following information needs to be created via Fleet and Asset Management:

• Manage Master Configuration - Where the part number, template structure and all related basic data is registered. The level of configuration control that the service provider is contracted to support as part of the maintenance visit, will determine the degree and complexity of Master Configuration which needs to be defined. If the service provider agrees to support full configuration management then the template structure which is created needs to represent, either a direct relationship to the operator’s configuration structure or to a level based on the Configuration Item (CI) level for which the service provider takes responsibility. If the service provider has no configuration control responsibilities, other than potentially providing a simple log of items removed, replaced or changed during the visit, then the minimum requirement is to create a template structure for the top level part. All maintenance requirements created in the Manage Maintenance Programs process will then need to be directly related to this part number.
• Manage Maintenance Program - Once again depending on whether the service provider has responsibility to manage the full maintenance program, the degree of event information can be limited to only those items directly related to the asset visit. It is possible, to represent all interval maintenance events (those which age either according to usage parameters or calendar) as convenience tasks. All event codes (modification, interval maintenance, fault functions, condition measurements and LLP replacements) to be included as part of the maintenance visit should be created along with all the task cards applicable to the event code.
• Manage Serialized Configuration - As a minimum, a single serialized instance of the asset representing the part applicable to the visit needs to be created. The number of serialized items is also dependant on the Master Configuration definition and the depth of the configuration definition.

The Plan Maintenance Visit process therefore covers the relating of various maintenance event codes to the instance of the maintenance visit. As such, interval maintenance, modifications, serial faults, deferred faults and LLP replacements that are agreed to be included as part of the maintenance visit are added to the maintenance order which represents the instance of the visit. This could either be a maintenance slot which is firmed up with additional information such as the serial number and event codes which are applicable or a new maintenance order which could represent an opportunistic maintenance visit.

Once all event codes and task cards have been added to the maintenance order, the planner will arrange the contents of the visit to attempt to ensure the best planning throughput through the maintenance facility. The planner will review the ELS Gantt, and create dependencies between various event nodes and task cards (resulting in a network of events) by using various inputs from:

• Historical visit information.
• Knowledge of the asset.
• Knowledge of the various tasks cards.
• Criticality of the task cards.
• Access to the zone or area within the asset.

The planner will also review any task cards which have not been grouped effectively into the most appropriate ELO (Execution Logic Order) node in the visit structure and move these to the most valid ELO.

Once the planners of a visit are satisfied that the plan is accurate and representative of the scope of the maintenance visit they will:

• Perform a critical path calculation to determine whether the plan can be effectively executed.
• Initiate material demands to ensure that supply activities provide the material items to satisfy the required date.
• Initiate any resource (person groups or tools/equipment) planning/acquisition activities.

Maintenance Visit Inspection

Often service providers and operators agree that a pre-visit inspection can physically be performed against the asset before it is scheduled to arrive at the maintenance facility. The objective of these inspection visit(s) is to gain further confirmation of the validity of the agreed content of the visit and also gain better understanding of the basic maintenance condition of the asset before it arrives at the service provider. As part of this process, additional events can be negotiated for inclusion, specifically where AD (airworthiness directive) and/or SB (service bulletin) and so on and so forth have been published but not incorporated against the asset. It is also possible to exclude some event from the scope especially in instances where interval maintenance of components and such were agreed during the planning phase of the visit, but where component changes have occurred between the original scope and the actual scope of contents for the visit.

Maintenance Visit Induction

Once an asset arrives at the service provider's facility it needs to be inducted. This potentially includes:

• Ownership change.
• Raising of faults to address discrepancies discovered during the transfer of the asset from the operator to the service provider.
• Location change.
• Recording of historical usage, interval maintenance and modification embodiment information.

Once the operational data for an object is updated, interval maintenance, modification events and LLP replacements are calculated. This could in turn require the addition of event codes to the maintenance visit to ensure that the reliability of the asset can be maintained.