CASE STUDY: Joramco’s new system offers a better way of working

Author: Shakespear Nyamande, Vice President of Planning at Joramco

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Shakespear Nyamande, Vice President of Planning at Joramco, shares their journey transforming MRO operations to digital and mobile

In this case study I want to share our digital transformation journey at Joramco and how we have utilized digitalization as an enabler. A lot of the focus will also be on the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of change management. But first, for those of you who might not know Joramco, where we are and who we are, I’ll briefly introduce the business.

JORAMCO

We are one of the leading MROs in the Middle East serving many customers in Europe, South Asia and Africa, as well as the Middle East itself; and we’ll soon be adding customers from South America. Our owners are the Dubai Aerospace Enterprise (DAE), since 2017, and Royal Jordanian Airlines (RJ), but Joramco has more than 60 years’ experience in aircraft maintenance.

There are five wide body state of art hangars at Joramco’s base and they can accommodate up to 17 wide and narrow body aircraft plus there is expansion currently in progress. We also have 21 lines outside which proved very useful during the COVID pandemic. It’s a spacious facility including ten workshops, specialized in the repair and overhaul of over 400 product lines with more than 5,000 components processed annually, a warehouse with more than 70,000 parts and a store worth more than US$14 million; it’s all managed by around 800 staff.

As well as being an authorized MRO station for Airbus, Joramco is a Boeing key provider. We can handle up to 15 new generation aircraft and have an EN9110 certification. A new facility, currently under construction, will add five or six additional lines to the business’s capacity. We do about 1.4 million manhours in a year and carry out some 315 checks per year; the goal is 356 checks a year or a check each day. Joramco has a growing customer base (some of the customers are shown in figure 1) and we are transforming our business ready for the future.

Figure 1

Our transformation, as I hope to show you, started in 2017, seven years ago, when DAE invested in the business and gave the mandate to Jeff Wilkinson, our CEO, to start this journey. He believes in getting the right technology into the business and leveraging that technology to be able to get the best out of the organization.

IDENTIFYING THE NEED TO CHANGE

Of all the challenges we faced in the transformation, change management was the most significant. Our organization had existed for many years as part of an airline. However, a common issue that I’ve seen in organizations, in different MROs, is that people will rush in to implement a solution without first defining the problem it has to address and now we had to focus on making money. Getting people to understand that they are in a different ballgame in which it’s not only about the airline that we service but the global customer who are going to come to us: that was a very big change management challenge. How we managed it was to share the journey and show people the win-win of the transformation to get their buy-in.

In 2018, in what was a key strategic step, Joramco signed an agreement with EmpowerMX. Following that, 2019 was a busy year, rolling out the all-digital platform in which the most important thing was defining the ‘X’. If we go back to Lean Six Sigma principles, you have to know what you are chasing, you have to know the problem. A common issue that I’ve seen in organizations, in different MROs, is that people will rush in to implement a solution without first defining the problem it has to address, ‘X’. So, what was the problem, what needed to change in Joramco?

The first was manhour bookings. We had a legacy system which didn’t capture hours in real time; hours were manually recorded on NRCs (Non-Routine Cards) and this was a challenge when, at the end of the check, we were trying to validate how much time had actually been spent on the task. There would be a lot of negotiations with customers over how long a job had taken and, at the end of the day, we often had to compromise.

Contract management was the next thing that needed to change. We were an organization which depended a lot on Excel. Running a 1.4 million manhour facility with that dependency would simply not be sustainable in the modern world. We had to look for a solution that would address contract management.

Material and tooling management gaps were another problem. Even if you have the manhours, and readers will appreciate the prevailing global challenges in that, if your tools and materials are not on site, it’s impossible to deliver a check. That needed to change; we didn’t have a system which could link material availability directly to the task card. We would often start a task and could not see in real time the availability in stores. Also, ground service equipment was a challenge; we had invested in state-of-the-art equipment but still struggled with pre-planning its availability. We needed a system to support pre-planning, to ensure that all of our equipment was serviceable and available to utilize.

Lastly, we didn’t have enough data and, at times, we would make decisions with limited history and analysis. We needed accurate and actual data to enable us to see if we were making the right decisions. All of these problems were parts of the ‘X’ that we had to solve.

Our core ERP vendor management solution needed to change. We’d had a system for a long time which was sufficient for an airline division but when we wanted to do more as an independent MRO, it was difficult to convince our existing vendor that we wanted to be more agile, more astute, more dynamic. It was easier for us to go out into the market to find a new partner and, after some evaluation of what was available, EmpowerMX was our partner of choice.

Faced with complexity, as we all are in our everyday lives, it is best to go back to basics and that was the principle that guided our transformation journey. Calculations might look complex but when you break them down to their bare form, they are just about simple realities and steps. We went back to basics in Joramco and those basics amounted to asking ourselves, ‘what business are we in?’ The conclusion was that we are in the business of selling manhours. When you talk about manhours, it’s about both the man and the hours. If Joramco was to be set on a genuine transformation, we would need to put the man and the time management as the principal components of change.

THE PEOPLE AND THE PROCESS

Joramco has done a lot in terms of investing in people, a lot of programs, a lot of growth in incomes, and improved uniforms. The work environment was a big part of the transformation and something that would take time to get right. But we also needed to get tools to manage the time that the people were on the facility: that meant that we had to understand the MRO process. It started with the contract, then the planning solution, the support, the people behind the scenes, the execution itself had to be digitalized, as well as the audit and, of course, invoicing at the end. Again, there was an emphasis on basics.

We defined the process as it was and as we wanted it to be in order to know where we were and have a vision for the future because where there is no vision, people perish. As well as knowing where we were and where we wanted to be, we knew that we had to invest in digital, the theme of this article.

If you are willing to invest and have a target: whatever transformation you agree to move across to or embark on, you will arrive at a destination; the question is will that be a planned destination or an unplanned destination? So, I would say, give yourself a target, ten percent increase in productivity is always a good start. Improve the workforce to foster win-win situations; while your organization is transforming and growing, your people are also transforming and growing into the organization. Also, invest in the people; have a team that knows what needs to be done and what is going to be done next. At the end of the day, you want to increase the throughput by increasing effectiveness, improving productivity, greater efficiencies and knowing more accurately what is expected check by check; better forecasting. And then everything will be secured by a process of continuous improvement, taking like-minded people and making them change agents.

We made the right choice and went with the EmpowerMX solution and that has made us a planning led and data driven organization. It’s given us seamless integration of the planning, the hangar, the logistics and stores. It’s true what they say: if you’re not moving ahead, you’re staying behind. What we’ve seen by getting the right system is that we’ve got a tool that is an enabler for us to get the benefits of digitalization.

WORKING WITH THE NEW SYSTEM

With the EmpowerMX solution, the biggest benefit we gained for the implementation was the presence of their on-site team. Before we engaged with EmpowerMX, they actually came to ascertain whether their product was the right product for Joramco. So, coming back to defining the ‘X’, EmpowerMX had the ‘Y’ which was the solution and we managed to get them both in alignment. From that point, the beginning of the whole process was all about process mapping. We had to make a process map of the whole organization from the Request for Quotation to the Certificate of release to Service. I would say onsite presence, processes and clear definitions of what ‘good’ looks like, have been critical factors in getting to where we are today.

EmpowerMX MRO Manager   has been designed to assist airlines and maintenance companies in the management of their assets including managing and satisfying maintenance requirements, planning and recording maintenance actions, and providing consistent data for reporting and analyses. Replacement of a legacy system with EmpowerMX paved the way for a data driven organization with a seamless integration of planning, hangar execution, logistics, procurement, and stores activities.

Introducing the new system to the workforce

As a company that has been spun-off from an airline, most of the people that came to Joramco with that were very senior in terms of tenure in the job. Those people were categorized by age demographic and using cultural dynamics – influencers, for want of a better word. We have people who are repositories of knowledge who are held in high regard; so, we took those people and, using the pareto principle, brought the long-established engineers and mechanics, and mixed them with the young generation to endorse that the new system worked. Using their age and how people perceived them as leaders to roll out the change was very effective.

We also showed people the benefits for them. Whereas they had previously had the challenge of manual entries through hundreds of NRCs, now they could enter everything electronically which saved them time, giving them more opportunity for productive work which improves job satisfaction.

In the beginning, change was difficult because people like to stick with what they know but we gave ourselves enough time at the right time to allow the organization to embrace the change. Even at the time of writing we were planning to go paperless with the proof pf concept scheduled for winter 2024 proceeding on a bay-by-bay basis, according to implementation outcomes, to foster continuous improvement. Picking the right time and pace is an essential part in introducing change, and engaging the right people is equally important.

What did we do with this system? How did we use this tool from EmpowerMX? We now have a situation where people and bookings are live; we can go into the system and see the aircraft, the tasks, what is being executed, what materials are available, which tool is being used and, if material is coming in, where is the airway and when are we going to have it: it’s all live with real time data. With contract management, we have a settlement which has taken away all the excessive negotiations. The task first goes to the customer who approves it up front so that, at the end of the check, our focus is on the CRS (Certificate of Return to Service), the safety of the aircraft, not the finance and all the negotiations. The material and tooling integration is now seamless, auto-replenishing, pre-load management, standardization of bill of materials. And our ground service equipment is pre-planned to go in the system, so you can order: ‘at this time today or tomorrow I will be doing landing gear retractions, please deliver the jacks?’ We have become a data driven and planning led organization. We now make better informed decisions because, at every point, we are able to look back and see what worked, what didn’t work, what we need to repeat and how we need to keep repeating it.

The beautiful thing about digitalization is that we work to set standards. A good engineer follows the AMM (Aircraft Maintenance Manual) to the letter. What we’ve managed to do is to set a template based on the latest and accurate data, the AMM (we always follow the AMM) and historic values based on the AMM; and, with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), anything that deviates from that single source of truth is picked out and that’s how we do our verification. A practical example is that we all agree that the job is only done when the paperwork is complete, but something as simple as a missing stamp, a missing signature or date renders the whole certification process incomplete for a specific task card. So, because we know what ‘good’ looks like, we’ve defined it; we’re now beginning to deploy artificial intelligence to pick out the obvious errors and keep us to the standards we have set and that is always reviewed by a group of experts to remain current.

In the past, when a new job arrived, we would have given the customer a Gant chart but those who have used a Gantt chart will know that it is the most static status of an input; it’s out of date the moment that it’s issued. Now, with the digital plan, when customers come, we give them a login to EmpowerMX where they are able to see the milestones, the phases and the material requirements for their job. Our customers utilize the program to follow the step-by-step progress in the system and, when NRCs are raised, instead of raising the NRC, doing the task and then going at the end of the check to negotiate, we immediately issue the NRC for approval and it only gets into our production environment after the customer’s approval. That is a continuous understanding of the check which also allows for progressive approval and makes our financial projections better.

For MROs, to reach automation is all about knowing the need that you have because today, in our organization, our biggest emphasis is on task execution and an ability to make better decisions. It’s a big task but, in Africa, there is a philosophy for ‘how do you eat an elephant?’ to which the answer is, ‘one bite at a time’. The road to automation is not a sprint it’s a marathon and you tackle it one bite at a time.

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

Although people in the sector shout about engineer shortages, we are lucky in Jordan which has a huge youth demographic and we have a training academy. We don’t have a manpower issue and we invest heavily in training which is not just academic but includes theory and practical. Then, when they do the induction, to make sure that they’re up to date, we don’t bring new people straight to our hangers, even if they are experienced, we give them a month where we familiarize them with the systems, with EmpowerMX MRO Manager, with the processes and the safety procedures. It’s an additional month’s salary to pay but the return has been good.

We have a very ambitious leadership in our organization and we are always reaching for the stars so, with the advent of AI, we are now in a space where we are thinking, let’s leverage all the tools that are available. Let’s also be kind to the Earth; we are living in an era of sustainability. We’ve just completed four months of extensive preparation for a project to endeavor to go achieve the goal of going paperless. As already mentioned above, we’re planning to do a proper concept at the time of writing during our downtime and maybe in the future I’ll be able to share that success story. It is an ongoing project to move to a paperless environment to enhance productivity, provide technical records, and to ensure easy availability of maintenance data for technical staff. MRO Manager process control software helps MROs save money by going paperless with everything from project management to timesheets. This reduces turnaround times and improves quality as well as speed, efficiency, and forecasting. We’re confident, everything looks optimistic and we are looking forward to getting more efficiencies and productivity, more access to data and to giving technicians all the tools that they need to deliver a good product.

Our DAE Engineering CEO, Jeff Wilkinson, recently made a statement that got a few MROs thinking. He said, “If you’re not making money now in the MRO business, you’ve got something fundamentally wrong…” And I agree with that view because, with digitalization, with the tools that we have, the networking in this era where data management is becoming a very big part of a successful business, this is the time for MROs to be getting as much as they can. So, we are learning to use artificial intelligence and all the available tools to grow our margins and to give our customers safer products. Joramco’s CEO, Fraser Currie, based in Amman, recently addressed a conference where he explained how transformation, digitalization, processes and change management have delivered not only innovation and excellence but also customer satisfaction. One thing that always upsets customers is when they are told that an aircraft which was supposed to be released to service tomorrow morning and which had a scheduled flight to Dallas, is not now being released on time and is suddenly delayed, as this can disrupt the whole network. Because of the amount of work that we have put into digitalization, we’ve managed to get a really big return in the wake of customer satisfaction; no more green, green, green, red.

With all the initiatives that I’ve shared here, I just hope it has proved useful to any readers contemplating a similar transformation in their MRO.