Asset Inspection Automation for Aerospace Industry

The client is a leading aviation company of USA owning massive number of aircrafts scheduled for enormous flights. Preflight inspection in aircraft for obligatory assets such as life vests and oxygen canisters was a manual process keeping their ground crew personnel overblown for several hours before each flight takeoff followed tedious paper work and compliance record. Inability for utilizing utmost life cycle of assets was another concern.

• End to end automation for inspection of assets was the fundamental objective as manual inspection was actually a time intensive process with possibilities of human error.
• Alone inspection was not enough it had to be documented as well a part of compliance and client believed that the sweating for such process had no worth affecting entire commercial aviation ecosystem. More than 95% of reduction in human efforts was the minimum requirement.
• An internet independent application with ability to perform real time communication with back end data center was required for a perfect solution.

• After considering the seriousness of pre-flight inspections and on board asset management, Azilen carried out a skillful analysis and developed a strategically designed iPad application.
• Azilen made the asset itself an element of information system by proposing RFID tags. This concept revolutionised the sluggish manual inspection into a seamless walk-through inspection, significantly reducing the turnaround time. Thus, optimization of the entire asset inspection process, substantially increased the user efficiency & productivity. Also, a dedicated Experience Matrix was engineered, to amplify and digitalize the Asset Inspection Experience:
  
  
  Experience Matrix:
  1. Establishing Synergy: Between the UI & UX along with dynamic cabin seat map generation for effortless monitoring.
  2. Expedite Reporting: Real-time data visualization and analytics along with generating the digital reports, eliminating the tedious documentation.
  3. Easy Design: Simplistic and abstract design catering to a limited and target user group for utmost adaptability.
  4. Excellent IA: Information architecture providing the optimal accessibility and availability for an end-to-end inspection processes.
• There were two major considerations during assets inspection, one is the asset availability and other is asset validity in terms of expiry. So, two types of process got defined : Commissioning and Inventory Check
• Each asset needs to get tagged with RFID tags containing basic information about the asset including expiry date. All assets are scanned before placing them to aircraft, and hence back end data center will have all information about asset, asset life and asset placement. The application will fetch this data to handle inspection visible through iPad.
• Every time when the aircraft inspection gets carried out, ground crew personnel can have a walkthrough inspection carrying the mobile device having the application installed and an RFID handheld reader to scan the aircraft. Once the scanning process starts, the user will start the RFID reader and start walking in the aisle. The reader will detect all the assets which are tagged with RFID tags.
• During the walk-through inspection, ground crew personnel will be able to see the graphical view of aircraft seats identifying asset status with two different colors codes. Based on the color code of the seating location or non-seating location, the user will be able to quickly identify the status of tagged assets. i.e. if asset is scanned and valid – Green, if asset is scanned and invalid – Amber and asset not found at all – Red.
• Once inspection is completed, the application will run report used for compliance document.
• The application will sync all the reports after inspection to the backend data center. It will be in sync with back data center to assure flawless data communication. In case of internet issues, application can work offline and handle the inspection successfully. Once internet issue is resolved, it will automatically be synced with data center.

• More than 95% of reduction in human efforts and time.
• Extending of asset life cycle and minimizing the wasted cost through eliminating possibilities of preexpiry replacements that may take place due to human nature.
• Increased accuracy of inspection along with tighter inventory controls.
• 100% elimination of paper based record keeping.