reducing turnaround times for Air Canada
Fleet management
Mobile device management
Overview
Air Canada is the largest airline of Canada by fleet size and passengers carried. Keeping their fleet of aircrafts in optimal condition is a critical part of everyday operations. Their Maintenance and Repair Organisations (MRO) must optimize aircraft maintenance procedures to ensure security while minimizing the turnaround time between flights, thus limiting the costs associated with having an aircraft grounded.
Ensuring these maintenance engineers have mobile tools with the latest documentation is essential to meeting regulatory requirements and achieving optimal aircraft security. However, maintaining synchronicity across all devices throughout multiple sites presents a number of challenges which can add significant costs and delays which can result in longer aircraft turns.
When the challenges of managing their mobile devices became too costly, Air Canada turned to us to help solve their problem and ensure their teams had up-to-date and ready-to-use devices at all times. This case study takes a look at how M3 Solutions helped make it happen.
The challenge
SAFETY & COMPLIANCE
Today’s aircrafts are increasingly sophisticated and technically advanced. The amount of documentation needed to outline every aspect of an aircraft’s maintenance has increased tenfold since the days of printed maintenance manuals. Aircraft manufacturers are constantly updating their maintenance documentation to ensure compliance and adherence to safety regulations. In addition to monthly technical publications which are regularly supplied by aircraft manufacturers, there are also unscheduled releases as often as required to catch critical maintenance deficiencies in the equipment and prevent any failures. In both instances, the challenges surrounding how the information is transmitted and how quickly it can be distributed across MRO teams, in every location around the world, to ensure proper compliance across the entire fleet of aircrafts, become critical.
MAINTAINING SYNCHRONICITY
With maintenance crews operating in multiple locations worldwide and servicing any number of aircraft models, maintaining synchronization across all of their mobile devices can pose a significant challenge. This is not only to ensure the aircraft’s maintenance documentation is up-to-date but that the devices’ OS matches the requirements of the mobile app which provides that information, most often provided from the the aircraft manufacturer. If different tablets have different OS versions then errors may occur which can impact the smooth operation of maintenance teams and result in longer aircraft turns, not to mention added strain on I.T. resources tasked with resolving those errors.
MAXIMIZE I.T. RESOURCES
Updating every device so they have the right operating system, app version and latest documentation is often a time consuming process. Doing this manually on a per device basis can put an enormous strain on any I.T. department and require multiple people to achieve in a timely manner. Furthermore, because of the delays associated with this update process, ensuring that maintenance crews all have synchronized documentation on their device, right when the update is scheduled for release, is virtually impossible.
SECURITY & CONTROL
It’s easy to imagine how sensitive the information regarding an aircraft’s inner workings can be. As such, the devices used to communicate this information need to be secured in the most efficient way. The airline’s administrators must also be able to track each device and have a detailed reports of where it was used and by whom.
The solution
The M3 Platform is designed to secure, manage and synchronize an entire fleet of devices across multiple locations. The platform enables Air Canada to take full control of their fleet of mobile phones, tablets and laptops to ensure their mission critical tools are always synched up and ready for business.
The M3 Platform can be customized to dock any number of devices and supports all major OS manufacturers. Access to devices is achieved via RFID card to ensure maximum security.
“The M3 Platform enables administrators to take full control of their fleet of devices ensuring maintenance engineers have ready-to-use devices at all times”
Air Canada Management
The Results
Air Canada saw significant gains as a result of using the M3 Platform. They were able to accomplish the following
- MULTIPLE DEVICE MANAGEMENT including tablets, laptops, mobile phones, running different OS, in the same installation.
- PHYSICAL ACCESS CONTROL to all portable devices, monitor the individual users with admin permission within a system management platform
- AUTOMATIC OS & APPLICATION ROLLOUT ensuring all devices remain up to date and ready for business
- REMOTE, UNATTENDED CONTENT DEPLOYMENT to some or all devices, anywhere in the world within minutes without I.T. resource intervention.
- DEVICE & SYSTEM MONITORING Ad-hoc reporting and transaction auditing.
- IMMEDIATE COST SAVINGS as a result of reduced IT resources and inventory management. Overall ROI is typically achieved within months of installation.
Conclusion
In addition to physical security, access control, and inventory tracking capabilities, the M3 Platform significantly helped streamline Air Canada’s maintenance operations by eliminating delays to synchronize all devices for various teams to use. As a result they were able to reduce the average aircraft turns by 20 minutes. We would be hard-pressed to find another industry where the adage, “time is money” is as applicable as it is in aviation. For Air Canada, the M3 Platform helped them save time and money.