British Airways Engineering is investing in excess of £25m in a SAP
system to automate the management of its world-wide aircraft
maintenance operations
Bill GoodwinBritish Airways Engineering is investing in excess of £25m in a
SAP system to automate the management of its world-wide aircraft
maintenance operations.
The project, the largest UK investment in SAP to date, is
expected to pay for itself in three years by reducing stocks of
spare parts and improving business efficiency.
British Airways plans to replace more than 150 legacy systems,
some up to 25 years old, with IBM hardware running the SAP R/3
industry and defence solution over the next two years.
"We are expecting not only to achieve considerable savings and
efficiencies with mySAP.com, but also to break new ground in the
global management of engineering," said Jim O'Sullivan technical
and quality director at British Airways.
The system will provide 8,000 British Airways staff with access
to technical manuals, drawings, details of spare parts in stock and
aircraft maintenance schedules through desktop computers fitted
with Web browsers. It is also expected to link BA with supplier
companies.
"It will speed up aircraft maintenance by providing workers with
instant access all the information they need," said Martin Boiling,
partner with PriceWaterhouseCoopers, which is managing the
project.
British Airways also plans to use the system to analyse data
from monitoring equipment fitted in aircraft to predict when parts
are likely to fail. The system will record the history of parts in
each aircraft.
A team of up to 100 people from British Airways,
PriceWaterhouseCoopers, SAP and EDS, which manages the airline's
legacy systems are working on the installation.
British Airways plans to implement the system in stages, with
the first phase going live in October and the final stage becoming
operational by the end of next year.
Pink project recoups cost