Compliance, compliance, compliance. For a moment, consider MRO's modern mantra, upon which rests much of this industry's laws and profits. "One of the big drivers that started us down this new [information] technology path was compliance," says David A. Marcontell, president of TeamSAI M&E Solutions. "We simply were not staying within the regs."

Compliance is the core of MRO, contends Marcontell. "We have a requirement to schedule maintenance activities--time-compliant activities at certain frequencies, on certain aircraft--and track the status of those items as time-dependent elements in accordance with flight hours, cycles and calendar time that are accrued on the airplane." Take an airworthiness directive, for instance. "We have to be able to discretely record, track and instantly show to the FAA (or other regulatory authority) the status of that time-controlled, AD-required item."

"Recognizing the importance of compliance and the importance of configuration management" are paramount, echoes Evan Butler-Jones, marketing manager at aviation software manufacturer Mxi Technologies. "Over the past few years?the first area we wanted to integrate was configuration management," he says, because it's an essential ingredient in getting compliance right. Butler-Jones believes communicating configuration management is the first, critical step in ensuring unambiguous communication across the enterprise. "In a lot of organizations, this first stage has occurred, right through the material supply chain."

Ironically, one problem in ensuring compliance throughout an airline, OEM or MRO is that people are preoccupied with compliance. Jack Demeis, founder and president of Continuum Applied Technology, believes that there's a fundamental irony at work in the calculus of compliance. "The reason automation isn't adopted readily in our industry is compliance. It's a huge deal. You can't blame the director of quality for an organization for wanting to make sure they're compliant with the regs," says Demeis. In some quarters, just to be on the safe side, that means sticking with slow and sluggish, but tried and true, compliance techniques.

To break through such barriers, "compliance must be blended with usability and simplicity," says Thomas DeLuca, director of business development, global aviation solutions, for software provider RAMCO. This is far easier said than done, and one of the biggest hurdles begins with the blending itself.

Parallel Universes

Weaning people from something that works, however imperfectly, can be a huge challenge. While some assert that it's merely a matter of flipping a switch--this change from siloed systems to something infinitely integrated--others maintain that it's a downright pain. One of them is TeamSAI's Marcontell.

"The reality is in these migrations that we run parallel systems to prove to ourselves, to prove to the FAA and regulatory agencies worldwide, that this new system is doing the same thing the old system did."

This entails running two systems at the same time, the legacy set-up ostensibly checking the newcomer. That means dual data entry, dual forecasting, dual tracking and sometimes duels within the organization. "It's very, very labor intensive," says Marcontell. And, it can take a ton of time, anywhere from 30 days to a year. Then, there's cost, a variable that depends on the legacy system, volume of data, fleet size and fleet variability. "At a little tiny carrier it can cost a half-million dollars," says Marcontell. And at the megas, "tens of millions of dollars."

Regulatory bodies have to bless the new set-up before it sheds its training wheels. Regulators "won't approve changes until you've demonstrated to them that the new system is doing exactly what it's supposed to," he says.