Data is becoming the most valuable currency in business. With large amounts of high-quality information, companies are able to uncover hidden insights, make transformational decisions, and avoid catastrophic failures. Even money can’t buy all that! It’s no surprise that data can be just as effective in aviation maintenance!
Aerospace MRO providers generate a huge amount of data in their daily operations, yet many of them neglect to capture, analyze, and leverage that information to improve their business. Let’s explore how you can change this, and further what kind of benefits data can generate for your maintenance affairs!
Capturing Data With IoT
One major reason that businesses fail to leverage data is because, well, they don’t know where to collect it! That’s where Internet of Things (IoT) technology comes into play. By creating devices that connect and communicate with other online systems, IoT-enabled sensors have revolutionized MRO data collection!
Now, maintenance providers can set up an IoT sensor inside all of their equipment; you could even place multiple sensors in each machine to capture different key measurements! Whether it’s to track temperature, rotations per minute, friction, or any other critical metric, IoT technology keeps your in the loop regarding your equipment performance.
Integrating With Digital Systems
However, all that information isn’t really being captured until you store it somewhere – that’s where digital maintenance systems can help! These are essentially equipment management tools that centralize all your operations into one ecosystem.
They’re especially useful when it comes to data management because they offer those IoT sensors a reliable place to dump all those measurements. Once it enters your software, MRO providers can begin to learn from that data and improve their maintenance offerings!
Maintenance Analytics
Now that we understand how to access high volumes of data, how can we analyze it? To answer that, let’s look towards the field of analytics.
Predictive and prescriptive analytics are a powerful source of operational insight, especially in aviation maintenance. These tools utilize machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) in unison with IoT technology to deliver highly-specific and specialized recommendations.
By combining innovative technology, analytical solutions are able to perform a robust scope of operations: they can evaluate histories, make assumptions, run tests, and then use their analysis to predict the future and prescribe meaningful advice.
Complex algorithms enable the software to automatically identify and learn from trends that are hidden deep within data, finding patterns that would otherwise be invisible to the human eye.
How It Works
It all looks good on paper, but how can a computer improve your maintenance affairs? Let’s explore a hypothetical example to better understand how this would really work.
Imagine you’ve just trained analytical models on 5+ years of landing gear measurements that you’ve collected. As it maps the data, your software can tell you the exact time that your landing gear will next fail.
After a little more analysis, it’ll also let you know that the failure will be caused by a particular strut that is overheating. You could even go one level deeper and learn that the strut’s heat exposure is the result of unusually high friction generated by a nearby hydraulic piston. This can continue on and on till the system arrives at the true cause of failure.
In analytics, this is known as the association model. It takes all the historical data related to a piece of equipment and tries to identify trends of causation. By analyzing each failure in the context of many other occurrences, you can map relationships between seemingly disconnected incidents and supercharge your maintenance. In practice, the association model offers aviation MRO providers an effective way to perform root cause analysis!
Wrapping Up
The power of data in aviation maintenance is limitless. It’s the most informed tool that exists, and the only way for MRO providers to make the best decisions with certainty and confidence. By leveraging Internet of Things (IoT) technologies alongside advanced analytics, you can start capturing, evaluating, and ultimately optimizing the entire scope of your operations.
Drive Data With Epiphany
When it comes to leveraging data in aviation maintenance, there’s no one better than Epiphany. We’ve been providing digital solutions in the equipment management space for years, carefully learning the qualities that drive successful implementation. With a team of industry veterans who specialize in enterprise software, we know what it takes to build out efficient digital systems.
Come turn data into meaningful decisions with Epiphany.
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