In the
approximately 15 months since SAP and HCL AXON added iMRO to its
MRO enterprise resource planning portfolio, about three-quarters
of SAP's new MRO customers have included iMRO as part of their
solution selection. Those customers are seeing their projects go
live in half the time it takes for a typical SAP MRO
implementation due to a reduction in custom development and
quicker acceptance by the end users.
Customers who opt for iMRO as part of their SAP MRO project
can expect to realize a number of other benefits. They
include: (1) improved productivity by avoiding duplicate
data entry because data only needs to be entered into the
system once; (2) greater planning accuracy because more
information in the system translates into better
understanding of maintenance needs; (3) execution times more
closely to the plan so fewer buffers in the schedule are
necessary, and a greater percentage of maintenance can be
planned rather than unplanned; and (4) increased uptime in
the utilization of assets, both the actual assets used for
the aircraft themselves and increased utilization of the
resources used to repair the aircraft.
"Our estimated benefits include several percentage point
improvement in asset utilization, so if you've got 20
aircraft in your fleet that's 1 less aircraft you need to
operate," said Richard Minney, iMRO solution architect for
HCL AXON, which developed the software.
There have been two releases of iMRO since the SAP
collaboration (versions 3 and 4). The first focused
primarily on operations. The second added engineering and
planning functionality including service bulletin and
modification management and finite capacity scheduling of
maintenance based on resource availability, coming out with
version 4.5.
"With the second release, we've moved within the realm of
being considered a best-of-breed solution for M&E/MRO
organizations. iMRO brings lower implementation costs and a
quicker path to go-live, as well as a significantly
simplified end-user experience." said Greg Huntington,
Industry Principle in SAP's A&D/Airline segment. "In
addition, the solution now has additional industry best
practices built into it, the result of HCL AXON's many years
of on-site MRO service delivery experience."
SAP's customers who have deployed iMRO are spread equally
between airlines, third-party maintenance providers and
OEMs, as well as between hangar, component and engine shops.
With approximately one-year-and-a-half under its belt, the
combined iMRO and SAP MRO solution has proven that it can
win against best of breed, and deploy rapidly (within 12
months).
"We are accomplishing our original intent, which has been
to standardize or productize important aspects of what has
traditionally been done locally, during each
implementation," said Huntington. "That is what iMRO is all
about, an important evolutionary next step, which is to
reduce local customization and simplify the supporting
maintenance processes."
iMRO is provided as a specialized industry add-on by HCL
AXON, developed using the SAP NetWeaver platform. This approach
capitalizes on lessons learned from more than 100 previous SAP
solution-based MRO installations, and reduces data
incompatibility, and system interface complexity and cost as
compared to bolting a standalone niche MRO application onto a
generic enterprise platform. |
