Phase II - Manufacturing Processes: Focuses on global transport, manufacturing and assembly operations. Goal is to improve process precision - get the right parts to the right place at the right time.
Phase III - Maintenance Processes: Track all the parts that go into the entire assembly operation of an aircraft, and automatically track and trace parts associated with a specific aircraft. Build an “electronic manifest” to speed and improve serviceability.
“Each phase represents a scope of processes,” Nizam said. “The Phase 1 pilots were conducted between January and April 2006, and the results were overwhelmingly positive. As a result, the results were then applied to multiple areas that were relevant to the release 1 processes. These areas span all the countries that Airbus operates in. Each geographic area represents a project in itself. These projects are then prioritized for deployment based on a company schedule. And, of course, each project will not go big bang, but will go through a pilot phase (meaning ramp up in this context) to stabilize the new process then expansion for completion.”
Each of these phases is a major effort, and includes a series of sub-projects across operating regions.
“Phase 1 is currently in deployment. This means we are working down the prioritized list of projects within Phase 1,” Nizam added. “The A380 aircraft Final Assembly Line in Hamburg has fully deployed the RFID enabled solution for automatic container tracking, as has the Single Aisle (A318/A319/A321) Final Assembly Line in Hamburg. We are in ramp up phase on a number of other locations in Germany and France. The total time for phase 1 covering all Airbus business operations is difficult to estimate because we are talking about all Airbus locations so it would be safe to say in the order of years.”
In parallel with the Phase 1 rollout, the pilot trials for Phase 2 are in their final stages.
Supplier Integration
In a key element of the Phase 1, Airbus will be working with suppliers to tag shipments. Suppliers can attach readers to computers that access Airbus’ web-based portal application to communicate RFID-based shipment data to Airbus, creating Advanced Ship Notices that will be used in receiving, and improving inventory visibility.
“The RFID readers under the Airbus umbrella of operations will be supplied at Airbus cost. The auto ID software platform that processes this information is at Airbus cost,” Nizam said. “The E-Supply Chain tool (which is free to our suppliers) provides all the necessary means for information exchange between our supply chain partners, the Auto ID software platform and Airbus business systems.”
When suppliers dispatch deliveries, the information is entered onto the Airbus portal, which then sends the information to the relevant Airbus business systems. When an item within Airbus operations is read by a bar code or RFID reader, the information is sent to the auto ID platform and it references the information that was transferred to it from E-Supply Chain application prior to dispatch.
The auto ID platform is from Oat Systems, in partnership with IBM. Much of the business process transformation is enabled by a suite of IBM technologies, including its WebSphere business process management platform.
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