Vendor alliance powers maintenance mobility
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 12/1/2004 7:00:00 AM
When a B-1 or B-52 bomber arrives for service at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City, those responsible for keeping it flight worthy are looking at six months of downtime during which the plane will be completely dismantled—right down to its engines—inspected, serviced, and reassembled.
A new solution from Intel Corp.; product life-cycle management (PLM) vendor UGS; and the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (NMCS) is promising to get these planes back in the air faster, saving the Air Force billions of dollars in reduced maintenance costs and replacement aircraft.
The point-of-maintenance solution—dubbed I-POMX (Integrated Point of Maintenance eXecution)—consists of software based on UGS' Teamcenter PLM portfolio, which serves as the digital backbone of Tinker's life-cycle management process, running on wireless tablet PCs based on Intel Centrino mobile technology. The program enables 1,800 engineers to refer to manuals and even draw on the expertise of more qualified people from wherever they are on the airfield.
The benefits from I-POMX are expected to be significant. Ed Kincaid, NCMS program manager at Tinker AFB, expects the system to dramatically streamline the maintenance process, reduce aircraft maintenance cycle time, and, most important, increase the time the aircraft are "in service." Moreover, expensive transcription errors, such as ordering incorrect replacement parts, can be all but eliminated.
"By digitally capturing and being able to review repair and overhaul information about a weapon system, we can now place an order, receive an order, assign parts, and get access to on-site technical data at the point of maintenance, which eliminates weeks of maintenance cycle time due to paper processing latencies," says First Lt. David M. Moore, chief of aircraft battle damage repair engineering at Tinker. "This solution not only reduces inspection process time, it increases data accuracy and enables maintenance history tracking. The result is a substantial overall improvement in the depot evaluation and inspection process."
I-POMX is one result of Intel's growing alignment with its end users. Says Dick Bland, manufacturing vertical industry manager, Intel Corp., "We realized that we needed more of a seat at the table with the customers using our products. We need to look at it the way the customer does—vertically—and deliver a solution to the real business problems they are facing."
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