All companies strive to maximize their assets. But for organizations that rely on high-value assets to keep their business running, effectively maintaining and optimizing those assets can often mean the difference between productivity and downtime, profit and loss, success and failure.

Entities such as aviation and defense organizations, transportation companies, delivery services and postal operations are increasingly recognizing the importance of effective data tracking and trend analysis to get the maximum benefit from their maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) processes. They also realize that this analysis will help them keep their big-ticket assets operational and optimized for long-term efficiency and maximum uptime.

I recently had the opportunity to discuss the evolution of trends in the technical operations and MRO arena with Peeter Kivestu, Teradata's Director of Global Consulting Services for the travel, transportation and government industries. With 25 years of airline operation experience, Kivestu has been in a unique position to see firsthand the emergence of many new ideas and technologies related to MRO and to evaluate their long-term effectiveness. According to Kivestu, improved technology and data-gathering practices are fueling a shift in paradigms regarding how companies approach asset maintenance. This is changing the very landscape of the MRO environment forever.

A futuristic approach
In the past, Kivestu says, companies embraced a preventive, time-based approach to maintaining the components of large, high-value assets such as airplanes, engines or locomotives. Using this preventive model, maintenance crews performed specified maintenance at predetermined intervals such as annually, every 5,000 hours and so on.

enlarge A maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) system correlates the maintenance details of a high-value asset with other pertinent data to provide a reliability-centered maintenance approach to preventing failures and risks.

But preventive maintenance wasn't the most effective, Kivestu says. "The goal is to have the asset in service for the maximum amount of time. If you take it out for preventive maintenance, then it's out of service and not useful."

To avoid unnecessary downtime and the possibility of introducing new faults into system parts, companies moved away from the preventive maintenance approach in favor of reliability-centered maintenance (RCM). RCM focuses on defining the risks of any failure that might occur and developing processes to either avoid the failure or mitigate its impact.

While RCM helps companies prepare for any eventuality, Kivestu says the future of successful MRO practices lies in accurately predicting faults and failures. "The way the world is going now, we're moving in the direction of predictive maintenance. This means we can predict when a part will be worn out using information we've collected from the part as it's been in service. We can take the part out of service and correct it before there's a problem," Kivestu says.

The path to predictive maintenance
Comprehensive maintenance data gathering, advanced sensor technology and sophisticated analytical capabilities make the goal of moving to a predictive maintenance model achievable today, Kivestu says. But in order to get there, companies must have an MRO system that is capable of accumulating all of the maintenance event details of an asset's life cycle and correlating those details with other pertinent data to generate relevant, actionable information for all organizational levels. (See figure above.)

There's rarely a shortage of data that gets collected on high-value assets. The problem is that different departments often collect information for their own purposes, on their own systems, using their own business rules. Piecing together an accurate big picture from these scattered snapshots can be a daunting, if not impossible, task.

Consider, for example, the different kinds of information that workers gather and store during a day in the life of any high-value asset:

	Line maintenance workers need the most current information to help troubleshoot a problem now and make immediate repairs.
	Reliability engineers' primary concern is analyzing metrics related to the long-term wear and tear of parts.
	Materials management professionals process information about parts purchasing and inventory availability.
	Overhaul technicians work with asset remanufacturing processes.
	Logistics experts focus on getting the right parts to the right place at the right time.

"At the end of the day all of these people are worrying about the same thing—the asset," Kivestu says. "But each of these jobs has a different focus and timeframe, so each is filtering and accumulating their own data."

This environment demands the ability to execute complex queries, joining data from many sources. To illustrate, a reliability engineer wanting to build a business case for modifying a single airplane part might need to join a dizzying array of details about that part. He would need information such as: removal history, time on wing, current modification status, number of removals that yielded a "no-fault found," maintenance costs and operational costs related to maintenance delays—just to name a few.

An effective MRO solution can help combine all of that disparate data, on a real-time basis, into a clear, bottom-up view of the company, says Kivestu. "When you have a single version of your data, then you can make better, smarter, faster business decisions with all the pieces that are needed—it takes the guesswork and assumptions out of the picture."

The growing trend of technology is to provide high-value asset companies with better MRO data tracking and trend analysis. With this integrated data, diverse users across the enterprise are empowered to make accurate comparisons, detailed analyses and smarter front-line decisions. T

The Teradata Tech Ops/MRO solution Teradata's Tech Ops/MRO solution enables companies to reduce waste and labor costs, streamline procedures and lower capital investment in parts and assets. Through analysis, companies can anticipate non-routine events, thereby improving the mission-readiness and maintenance reliability of assets and components. The Teradata Tech Ops/MRO solution portfolio includes: > Teradata Tech Ops/MRO Logical Data Model (LDM): a comprehensive, flexible blueprint built around the aviation industry standards (ATA Spec2000) integrated with Teradata's industry LDMs for organizing purchasing, maintenance, reliability and inventory management data in the Teradata Warehouse. > Teradata Enterprise Data Warehouse Roadmap: a visual planning model used for the implementation of a Tech Ops/MRO enterprise data warehouse strategy. > Business Impact Model Dashboard: projects and measures business benefits such as reduced inventory, increased utilization and productivity. > Teradata Financial and Performance Management solution: designed to link key operational data with financial information to maximize revenue, minimize cost, optimize capital allocation and hedge against risk. > Teradata SeeChain: captures and analyzes data from disparate data sources, providing visibility and predictive analytics on orders, shipments, status and inventories. > Teradata Master Data Management (MDM): provides a single source of all data derived from a company's assets, suppliers and customers. > Attensity Text Analytics: delivers text analytics software that rapidly and accurately transforms unstructured data into valuable, actionable information. > SAP integration with Teradata: combines Teradata's deep analytic capabilities with SAP's business intelligence (BI) capabilities, so users can analyze historical and current detail data from across the enterprise. —R.S.

Teradata Magazine-March 2007