ATP Announces Custom Alerting in ChronicX® Solution

New Customer-Driven Innovation Expected to Dramatically Minimize AOG Risk While Boosting Fleet Health and Equipment Utilization

ORLANDO — MRO Americas — April 25, 2017 — Aircraft Technical Publishers (ATP) — the aviation industry’s premier provider of information, tools, and services for manufacturers, owner/operators, and maintenance providers — today announced Custom Alerting, a new customer-driven innovation in the ChronicX® Solution that enables the automatic detection and management of chronic and critical defects with unprecedented accuracy, speed and control. Airlines and MROs deploying the ChronicX Solution with Custom Alerts are expected to dramatically minimize Aircraft on Ground (AOG) risk while boosting fleet health and equipment utilization.

The new Custom Alerts tool complements the already powerful capabilities of the ChronicX Solution by enabling users to set up customized alerts to monitor fleets on an ongoing basis for issues of specific interest and automatically generating user-defined defect reports.  This new product innovation represents a breakthrough in performance relative to competitive alternatives. Custom Alerts are generated when the powerful text-matching algorithms of ChronicX identify defect reports that match user-defined rules, which can be created quickly using built-in rule templates and pick lists drawn from the operator’s own fleet data. Rules are previewed on existing fleet records, dramatically increasing the speed and quality of rule creation, making the learning curve brief for even novice users.

The combination of Custom Alerts and ChronicX uniquely enables users to manage and monitor fleets for both known and unknown issues. ChronicX excels in identifying recurring defects while the Custom Alerts tools enables users to customize alerts to automatically monitor specific types of events, such as “smoke”, “flap jam”, and “nose wheel shimmy.” With Custom Alerts, airlines and MROs can more efficiently and effectively perform required tasks such as Service Difficulty Reporting and monitor the trends of issues across an entire fleet, among other benefits.

“We developed the Custom Alerts innovation in response to ChronicX customers who were looking for a better way to manage the time-intensive and often error-prone process of sifting through Pireps and Mareps to report on specific types of defects,” said Phil D’Eon, Senior Vice President, Strategy, for ATP. “Customers were frustrated with relying on conventional methods, and wanted a specialized tool to streamline and automate the process with greater control, precision, and speed. This new tool automatically monitors for issues of concern, and provides alerts and reports when matches are detected.”

Custom Alerting uses the same proprietary text-mining engine and powerful text normalization algorithms that ChronicX uses to intelligently “read” text and understand multiple ways of describing similar events. This text-matching ability enables airlines and MROs to overcome the persistent challenge of accurately matching valid reports that are described using different terminology, including misspelled words and incorrect ATA coding. For instance, ChronicX with Custom Alerts is able to recognize and match defects that have been described differently as “nose wheel shimmy,” “nose gear vib,” or “NWS shimmy”.

D’Eon continued: “While our Custom Alerts functionality is new, ChronicX is a mature solution with a proven track record of transforming raw data into the real-time actionable intelligence that drives key operating metrics. Taken together, ChronicX with Custom Alerts uniquely provide our customers with a powerful and efficient means for perpetually monitoring and managing recurring defects, in addition to the visibility required to optimize fleet health and shrink unscheduled downtime.”

The new Custom Alerts tool is now available at no additional cost to current subscribers of the ChronicX Solution, which is deployed by both regional airlines and major air carriers.

The ChronicX Solution, a product of CaseBank Technologies, Inc., a Division of ATP, evaluates aircraft defect histories to accurately identify all valid repeats, at both the tail number and fleet-level. This raises the efficiency with which maintenance teams recognize and address problems that are eluding repair and dragging down fleet reliability. Greatly exceeding simple text mining and ATA code matching, ChronicX uses advanced natural language processing and fuzzy logic to analyze maintenance records (MAREPS) and pilot reports (PIREPS). This process uncovers clusters of potential recurring defects and emerging failure modes that have not yet reached critical status, in order to prioritize the most critical and costly problems.

The ChronicX® Solution with Custom Alerts makes its debut at the MRO Americas Conference, which takes place April 25-27 in Orlando, FL.