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It's High Time to Break this Shackle of 'Who Will Do It First'

By Ravinder Pal Singh, Global Chief Information and Technology Officer, Air Works
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
By Ravinder Pal Singh, Global Chief Information and Technology Officer, Air Works
<1>Founded in 1951, Air Works is the leading EASA certified provider of aviation MRO and painting services, qualified to maintain 50 plus aircraft types across hangars in India, Europe and Middle East.

Aviation IT is laggard in aviation domain overall, more so in India. It is surprising but true. Surprising! As it's a young domain and uses complex engineering inside aircraft or its mechanical and civil ecosystem but still way behind in adopting information technology or computational science to enhance productivity, overall operational efficiency and create a healthy ecosystem of co-creation. Things are changing but still slowly mostly due to the gap between technology innovation and its adoption to existing aviation standards and regulations.

Few simple examples to illustrate my point: Aviation probably has one of the better defined standards but translation of those standards using secure commodity technology has not happened in the veil of debates on IP, conflict of business interest and competitive edge and others. Fact is and it has been proven by relatively simple industries where in-spite of huge brand rivalries there is general agreement and practice of standards resulting in overall upliftment of all in ecosystem. It's quite reverse in aviation, at top of the value chain different OEMs have different standards, different translations and thus creating a unique ecosystem till lowest in engineering value chain which are MROs. This adds to inefficiency and increases in operating cost and brings overall industry down compared to other domains like financial services or retail and others. Simplest mirror is to look at the IT solution providers in aviation engineering whether its ERP, Content Management, Point-solution providers or others.

Everyone is struggling and no one standout in terms of innovation, cost of solution, fitment to industry needs for most. It's strange that a legacy technology like RFID is still talked about as new initiative in the aviation industry. Hence, there is huge gap in the beauty of aircraft or hangar engineering versus IT adoption. Having said that, we at Air Works decided couple of years back that we will use IT as key strategic enabler to achieve our ambitious non-linear growth. It would have been impossible if we would have taken a classical legacy expensive approach and quite frankly we didn't had that kind of cash at our disposal. So we used commodity technology which other domains were using effectively.

For instance, we have created secure cloud on our own terms and it's our defacto platform to do business computations, customer visibility and internal collaboration. We have used advanced network techniques to combine various formats and protocols of networks to connect over 50 plus locations, hangars and lines stations. We are early adopters of BYOD but ensure that both privacy of employees and corporate data is secured and protected. We have multi-layers of data protection, its backup and archiving adhering to our enterprise data-classifications. Post digitization of our people and processes, we have initiated our journey of industrial internet to connect people, process and "things". We take care of over 50 types of aircrafts which is remarkably high complexity versus most in aviation engineering or even airlines, when I ventured into market of solution providers to simplify this complexity via digitization no one came forward to help or to even co-create hence we created our technology.


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