That was before Pratt & Whitney embarked on a major IT initiative in the late 1990s that included, among other things, selecting SAP as the company's enterprise resource planning (ERP) backbone on both the OEM and aftermarket sides. Today, a visitor to the Middletown plant won't find any paper on the shop's floor, said Hawman, director of information technology, Global Service Partners, Pratt & Whitney. Millions of sheets of assembly instructions printed each year have been replaced by electronic manuals; time card entries replaced with keystrokes; and ink signatures swapped with electronic swipes of encrypted badges.

Hawman's repair shop network isn't quite that far along, but it's getting there. With the help of SAP and several best-of-breed gap-fillers, such as iBASEt's Solumina work instructions software, Pratt & Whitney's shops have cut down on paper and boosted efficiency.

Hawman is careful to note that, despite the buzz often associated with the "paperless" shop floor, eliminating paper from the maintenance process isn't a goal, but rather a byproduct of a bigger strategy.

"We use paperless as more of an idea to capture where we're headed," Hawman explained. "The goal isn't to remove paper. The goal is to put the information about the service we're offering on the part or the engine into our information network so that we have all of the information about that part or engine's status, [and] also so we can optimize resources throughout the value chain." Hawman's pet project - streamlining operations at some 35 repair and overhaul shops - is a bit large to be dubbed typical for the MRO world. But his project is a common one in that "going paperless" is a result of a much more ambitious effort that involves applying hardware and software.

Disconnected Enterprises

In Pratt & Whitney's case, the ambitious effort is getting each of its commercial and military repair and overhaul centers on the same page. "If you go back five years, we were made up of a couple dozen businesses, operated as a disconnected set of enterprises," said Hawman. "Pratt & Whitney leadership identified that if we were going to be successful, we needed to view our aftermarket as a connected value chain, an integrated system of delivering services to the customer."

One element that Pratt & Whitney needed to harmonize were its work instruction delivery methods. The company's aftermarket services business had nearly as many systems for delivering work instructions as it had shops. Essentially, each facility had its own system for producing instructions that told the mechanics, or "associates," in Pratt & Whitney lingo, what to do.

The systems ranged from simple spreadsheets to "sophisticated home-grown" programs, Hawman said, but they had one thing in common: They usually couldn't talk to each other. This meant that not only were the systems different, but so was the information they were delivering, even for the same repair.

Take a turbine blade to three different shops, said Hawman, and you were likely to get three different sets of overhaul instructions. The differences might have seemed subtle, but often they reflected the best practices learned at one shop that, due to system limitations, weren't easily transferable to the company's other shops. More significantly, some of the old systems could not customize instructions, which made it difficult for shops to generate instructions with extra steps requested by the customer, or to eliminate steps that were recommended by the OEM, but not required.