THE PROBLEM
Airlines have an OEM / FAA / EASA / CASA compliance obligation to maintain a current electrical load analysis (ELA) for every aircraft in their respective fleets. A major airline client accomplished this by tracking every change to the electrical load using highly complex manual spreadsheets. A typical spreadsheet for a single aircraft held 100+ tabs each with hundreds of rows of data, project notes and OEM prescribed calculations. Multiply this by hundreds of aircraft and you can get a sense of the complexity at work.
Updates to an aircraft’s electrical load for changes made to an aircraft or a fleet – whether driven by Service Bulletins, Airworthiness Directives, Supplemental Type Certificates, and custom modifications (e.g. the addition of wifi, galley reconfigurations) took weeks or months to be reflected in the spreadsheets. When vendors were contracted to complete a modification, hard copy pdf documents had to be manually transposed into spreadsheets and resulted in engineering design rework. Change history was tracked but was problematic. Regular reviews were required by senior electrical engineers, specially trained in each OEM’s Electrical Load Analysis methodology.
The effort associated with managing spreadsheets represented a material cost to the business and the complexity of electrical load analysis required specialist skills and training. Other firms had been engaged to provide or develop a software application that managed ELA maintenance but failed, unable to deliver a solution that met the challenge of making ELA maintenance simple, intuitive, controlled, and transparent.
THE RESULTS
Savings in engineering time and $ spend were immediate and enduring. Benefits included:
95%
Reduction in the effort to induct an aircraft ELA and provide a sale / lease return ELA.
85%
Reduction in the cycle time for an ELA update. Spreadsheets and meetings were eliminated by the ELM workflow. Accountability for authoring projects, testing the impact of different designs , requesting and receiving approval was delegated to Avionics and Interiors engineers.
80%
Reduction in Engineering time spent updating ELAs, releasing Electrical Engineers who previously updated project ELAs for days and weeks to do more value-added work.
REAL TIME
Visibility of every aircraft and every modification, a complete analysis and aircraft change history and confidence the airline is in compliance with regulators and the OEM.
THE SEATEC SOLUTION
SeaTec developed a software application that:
- Ingests large volumes of data (millions of individual electrical load values) from multiple OEM aircraft baselines and unique customer modified formats for newly inducted to decades old aircraft
- Codifies the 1000’s of calculations unique to each OEM, fleet type and sub-fleet type
- Supports individual configurations required to re produce OEM analysis
- Provide intelligent validation and error checking to enable continuous real time analysis of modifications being affected
- Is designed to enable technicians and engineers not trained in OEM ELAs to understand an aircraft’s electrical configuration and test projects without wiring diagrams, spreadsheets and senior electrical engineer guidance
- Simplifies and controls the business process for modification change management
How? By delivering a :
- Rigorous analysis of OEM and customer data, current state and desired business processes
- Engineer centered user experience
- Comprehensive testing (inclusive of DER review) data migration and data validation
- Robust assessment and post implementation validation of the business benefits
Learn More – Visit our ELA Manager Page for more information.
