to support the 717, 747-400F and 787 models. Customers have access to a pool including high-value items, such as flight control surfaces and electronic units. Boeing is responsible for repair, modification, and testing as well as the record keeping.
Boeing has made some inroads with its Integrated Materials Management (IMM) program, Michaels observes. Focusing on consumables and expendables, IMM “[provides] a lot of value creation to the customer in consolidating purchases from a very disparate and fragmented base of suppliers.”
“The cost of purchase orders, alone, if you do it in small quantities, is very expensive to airlines,” Michaels says. “So if a consolidator can come in and not only alleviate the administrative burden, but also alleviate the asset management burden—where they come in and in essence stock the bins—that can be quite helpful to the airlines.” SAS Technical Services (STS), the Swedish carrier’s MRO, signed an IMM contract with Boeing back in 2008. Other IMM customers include Cathay Pacific, All Nippon Airways, Singapore Airlines and SIA Engineering.
Data Products
Boeing also is leveraging its data, something it’s been ramping up since the late 1990s. The company has about 13,000 airplanes in service and “has access to a considerable wealth of operational data,” Floyd says. Boeing collects operational data from airlines as part of reliability improvement programs, service requests that come in, and various other aftermarket offerings. Real-time information about airplanes has been provided to customers via the Internet since 2004, adds John Maggiore, Boeing’s leader of fleet and maintenance solutions. This data gives Boeing an advantage, Floyd says, because “we can aggregate over a larger set of data and, using sophisticated tools, we can find ways to optimize for individual customers.” Because of its knowledge of the customers’ operations as well as their route structure and environment, Boeing can customize their maintenance program to “drive unscheduled work to become scheduled work” and also to reduce the amount of scheduled work, he says.
“The whole data angle is not a big, high-ticket item,” Michaels says, but it is an enabler that can improve dispatchability and
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increase the attractiveness of the product. However, prognotistics—predicting failures— could be a different story, as the engine OEMs have proved. And who better than the OEMs to interpret data snapshots and recommend possible fixes— because of their bigger databases. “In that sense it’s a natural fit for the OEMs.” But the proof is in the pudding, and the challenge is to show that it’s worth the price.
The most prominent Boeing analytics tool is Airplane Health Management (AHM), which collects real-time performance data and forwards it to maintainers via data link or satellite communications. They then access it through Boeing’s Web portal,
MyBoeingFleet.com. When problems occur, AHM provides probable causes and recommended fixes. Based on historical data, AHM can tell an operator that a
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