How BAA uses MAXIMO to increase efficiency in its business
by MRO Software
BAA is the world’s leading airport company. It serves over 200 million passengers worldwide, including 122 million passengers in the UK. BAA owns and operates seven airports in the UK: Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Southampton — which together handle 69% of the UK’s passenger traffic.
BAA’s seven UK airports account directly for 111,000 jobs. Of the seven, Heathrow Airport is one of the UK’s largest employers with 65,000 people employed at the airport. BAA provides facilities and services to over 300 companies and organisations operating in or around the airport, including airlines, caterers, retailers as well as the HM Customs and Immigration services.
BAA had come to recognise that the systems and processes set up to deal with the upkeep of each airport were too diverse. It was widely acknowledged that the maintenance function was becoming an area of service quality and cost opportunity, so BAA took the decision to review its systems and processes and the IT systems supporting them in order to address these opportunities.
The review showed that whilst systems in place were found to be effective, BAA were losing out on a number of efficiencies by not having an approach that was more consistent. The BAA Engineering Maintenance team sat down and decided on key criteria on how the IT system could achieve true process dependency and efficiency for the business. These included identification of best maintenance practices for the company’s assets that had to be applicable to all sites. The system had to provide management data to aid lifecycle costing and budgeting; and effective work and resource planning via deployment of a tactical tool for day-to-day work scheduling. Finally, it had to be considered as a strategic tool to help in longer term forecasting of work and resources.
BAA had been using MAXIMO for over 10 years, having initially purchased the tool to replace a fault reporting system. BAA maintenance management recognised that MAXIMO could, in effect, help in supporting its requirements in developing a true consistent approach.
They saw that the product could provide a single solution that had comprehensive functionality around their core requirements of fault reporting, asset hierarchy, maintenance planning & scheduling. Steve Bennett, Maintenance Systems Development Manager at BAA explains, “Over the years we had built up our usage of MAXIMO more and more, making increasing use of the functionality the application provides. We could see quite quickly that MAXIMO could allow us to achieve our goal of having a much more holistic view of our overall maintenance process and goals.”
BAA set up The AMA (Acquire and Maintain Assets) Maintenance Change Programme to drive the streamlining of the whole asset maintenance approach, to harmonise all the different processes and work practices in operation across the business. The AMA aims to achieve a continuous cycle of improvement in the asset management process, to imbed process within the MAXIMO application and at the same time drive business improvement.
MAXIMO is a principal foundation of the AMA process. Managing 300,000 assets and a work order rate in excess of 34,000 per month across the whole BAA group means that the prioritisation of maintenance requests needs to be performed in a balanced, yet structured, manner. MAXIMO has brought the necessary focus to criticality; assigning work orders to the 450 direct employed and 400 contract employed technicians based on the strength of information available and previously agreed criticality assessment.
The asset infrastructure of BAA is extremely diverse. It includes a range of buildings, HVAC plant, loading bridges, baggage handling equipment, flight information systems — everything has a role in enabling the flow of many thousands of travellers and their baggage through the airport each day. One of many implementation challenges that BAA has faced was deciding to what level to record down to for each asset. Typically baggage handling systems consist of many components and modules. A pragmatic decision was taken to record down to the lowest level of maintainable part.
Another challenge has been ensuring that work orders are dealt with in a consistent and fair manner. With the extremely high level of work order requests across many diverse areas of the airport, it has been extremely important to align priorities across the organisation. Steve Bennett comments, “At Heathrow we have the Airline Operators Committee (AOC) that represents all the companies flying in and out of Heathrow. We agreed with the AOC that we would give priority to asset faults that would have the following fault conditions: a) an impact on the environment, b) is health and safety critical, c) have a cost impact to our customer or d) a cost impact to our business. By following this priority framework MAXIMO has given us a more balanced approach to fault resolution rather than putting unfair pressures on our maintenance teams or customer representatives in the heat of the moment.”
Another issue for BAA was the cultural and behavioural aspects required to implement the new system, especially around the use of technology, which BAA technicians had never previously experienced on this scale. Training and building confidence were key enablers to overcoming the quite natural fears of “system.”
As BAA’s use of MAXIMO has increased so too has the business’ dependence on it. Maintenance management has been more able to see the bigger picture of Asset Lifecycle Management. “This has enabled a far more informed and holistic approach to our thinking and has meant that we can now work with our customers in a very different way,” explains Bennett. MAXIMO not only provides the good quality management information for BAA and their customers but ensures that debate can be had regarding unplanned maintenance on assets and earlier identification and prediction of those assets that require far more lifecycle maintenance. Within BAA, Oracle Procurement and Financial applications are used, to which MAXIMO seamlessly integrates.
More recently BAA management have agreed to provide customers with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for each asset. The SLAs dedicate an agreed level of asset availability and incur a financial penalty if not met. MAXIMO provides the reports to measure these availability statistics. BAA is now starting to observe a much higher quality and integrity of data after implementing its process methodology via MAXIMO. Additionally, its people are now seeing the benefits of the system as a knowledge management tool.
Bennett concludes, “MAXIMO provides us the core system to optimise our maintenance organisation so that everything works when it needs to and gives our customers value for money.” Next steps for use of the system are looking at exploring the option of “self managed teams,” which would extend the Self Scheduling of Planned Work by BAA Technicians. For now though, company is exploring the significant benefits of a greatly harmonized maintenance system.
This article profiles the use of MAXIMO within BAA. For more information, visit: http://www.mro.com/corporate/maximo/transportation/aviation.php