Thinking about MRO IT Ravinder Pal Singh and Air Works have transformed their IT outlook and processes: here’s how! 16 | CASE STUDY: AIR WORKS | AIRCRAFT IT MRO | AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2015 RAVINDER PAL SINGH Ravinder Pal Singh (Ravi), Global Chief Information and Technology Officer, Air Works India has first- hand experience of how an MRO provider can meet technology challenges and take control of its own IT destiny. He well knows, as he puts it, “the yin and yang of a CIO’s life,”having spent time early in his career advising C-level executives worldwide, “on using technology to help their businesses.” Building on that hands-on experience, Ravi turned his thoughts and energy to better understanding and applying the rapid changes happening in technology today and how they could be harnessed to ensure that an MRO business can always be at the leading edge of MRO IT application. Today Ravi, as Global CIO for Air Works Engineering, puts the management and entrepreneurial lessons he learned and taught into practice for MRO IT. In the past, he explains,“India has struggled when it comes to aviation and especially aviation engineering.”Even Air Works, the company that Ravi joined and now leads from a technology perspective, was struggling not so long ago to imbibe technology and use information for its success. As Ravi’s article in the last but one issue of Aircraft IT showed, that has now changed to the extent that Air Works are now making their own weather in the field of MRO IT and so we asked him to share with readers a few of the philosophies and thoughts that have guided and driven his work and how he has applied them in practice. Aircraft IT

1. Thinking about MRO IT
Ravinder Pal Singh and Air Works have transformed their IT
outlook and processes: here’s how!
16 | CASE STUDY: AIR WORKS | AIRCRAFT IT MRO | AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2015
RAVINDER PAL SINGH
Ravinder Pal Singh (Ravi), Global Chief Information and Technology Officer, Air Works India has first-
hand experience of how an MRO provider can meet technology challenges and take control of its own
IT destiny. He well knows, as he puts it, “the yin and yang of a CIO’s life,”having spent time early in his
career advising C-level executives worldwide, “on using technology to help their businesses.”
Building on that hands-on experience, Ravi turned his thoughts and energy to better understanding
and applying the rapid changes happening in technology today and how they could be harnessed to
ensure that an MRO business can always be at the leading edge of MRO IT application.
Today Ravi, as Global CIO for Air Works Engineering, puts the management and entrepreneurial
lessons he learned and taught into practice for MRO IT. In the past, he explains,“India has struggled
when it comes to aviation and especially aviation engineering.”Even Air Works, the company that
Ravi joined and now leads from a technology perspective, was struggling not so long ago to imbibe
technology and use information for its success. As Ravi’s article in the last but one issue of Aircraft IT
showed, that has now changed to the extent that Air Works are now making their own weather in the
field of MRO IT and so we asked him to share with readers a few of the philosophies and thoughts that
have guided and driven his work and how he has applied them in practice.
Aircraft IT

2. O
VER MANY YEARS working in IT, I have come across a variety of
tools to help get things done but there is one that I value above all.
It is the checklist; a simple tool that the aviation domain has given
to all other domains and still one of the most successful tools for execution
success. It might be simple but it’s very effective. The checklist was first
introduced decades ago by the U.S. Air Force, since when checklists have
enabled pilots to fly aircraft of mindboggling sophistication. I have aligned
this simple tool to my domain of computational science and its promise to
my organization Air Works.
The practical clarity and commitment represented by a checklist
crystallizes thoughts into doable actions which can motivate us because
they set specific objectives while providing a clear path to the long-term
vision. Looked at as a template for transformation, it has worked in
delivering the change through technology that we wanted to achieve in Air
Works. From a selfish enterprise IT perspective it has not only generated
returns for the technology and engineering community within Air Works
but has also been appreciated by the global technology community. Some
measure of that appreciation can be seen in awards like the CIO 100 and, as
recently as March 2015, the NetApp Innovation Awards’ ‘Best Innovation
in Cloud Computing’.
UNLOCKING THE POWER OF IT; OUR STANDARDS
TO USE RIGHT NOW
If the checklist has been an idea that aviation has given the world, an area
with which we have sometimes struggled in aviation is IT, in the aviation
domain overall and more so in India. It is surprising but true. Surprising
because it’s a relatively young sector which uses complex engineering inside
aircraft or in its mechanical and civil ecosystem yet is still way behind in
adopting information technology or computational science to enhance
productivity and overall operational efficiency, and create a healthy
ecosystem of co-creation. Things are changing but relatively slowly due to
the gap between technology innovation and its adoption within existing
aviation standards and regulations.
A FEW SIMPLE EXAMPLES WILL ILLUSTRATE THE POINT.
Aviation probably has some of the best defined standards but translating
those standards using secure commodity technology has not happened,
despite all the debates on IP, conflict of business interest, competitive edge
and so on. And yet, the value of applying standards has been proven in
industries with much less technology sophistication than aviation. In-spite
of huge brand rivalries, where there is general agreement on and practice
of standards, those agreed standards have operated to the benefit of all. It’s
quite the reverse in aviation. Right from the top of the value chain, different
OEMs have different standards and different translations which in turn
create unique ecosystems extended right down to the lowest level in the
engineering value chain, MROs. This variance in standards applied to the
products of different OEMs adds to inefficiency, increases operating cost
and compares poorly to domains such financial services, retail or others.
Consider the IT solution providers in aviation engineering; whether
for ERP, Content Management, Point-solution providers or others. None
stands out in terms of innovation, cost of solution or fit to the needs of
most industry users. For instance, it’s strange that a legacy technology like
RFID is still talked about as a new initiative in the aviation industry. Hence,
there is huge gap in the quality of aircraft or hangar engineering as opposed
to IT adoption. Notwithstanding that, at Air Works we decided a couple of
years ago to use IT as the key strategic enabler in achieving our program
for non-linear growth. It would have been impossible if we had taken a
classical and expensive legacy approach, and frankly we did not have that
kind of cash available. So we used the commodity technology that other
domains were already using effectively.
We solved the standards problem for ourselves by creating an Air
Works ‘fabric’ which has its own service bus, translator, convertor and
adapter for all the types of aircraft with which we deal. This technology
and its architecture have driven business change by changing the whole
structure of the business and its value chain. Now the CAMO (continuous
airworthiness management organization) truly behaves as it should,
leads the value-chain and initiates the processes, and thus the activities in
our hangar.
As a simple quantitative illustration; a typical track and trace activity
which in the past could sometimes take 5-6 months in CAMO, Planning,
Engineering and Supply-chain, today takes about 350 milliseconds, my
performance KPI for any system in Air Works. Imagine the cycle-time
improvement and reduction in conflicts that this improvement has
brought about. Also, by directly connecting our customers to their jobs
in our business through Air Works app-mart on Cloud, we have removed
any opaqueness thus increasing customer satisfaction and timely dispute
management.
DOING IT FOR OURSELVES
This all came about because when, a couple of years back, Air Works
ventured into the solution providers market to find a way to simplify this
(above) complexity via digitization, no one came forward with a solution or
even to co-create a solution with us. Hence we created our technology, our
own Intellectual Property. Now given this visible successful transformation
via digitization, we are looking to create a software platform and services as
a business capability to sell and increase our profitability.
In short, it’s high time that more people in this industry who are
passionate about aviation stopped worrying who will make the first move
(or hiding behind the excuse of the regulatory framework) and took
concrete initiatives... carved new paths. It’s time to match the quality of
engineering inside the aircraft with its external ecosystem of hangars
and line-stations: to make the business of aviation engineering profitable
using simple, cheap and readily available technology. As like-minded
technologists in aviation, we need to take a leap of faith.
EXECUTION: THE KEY TO ACHIEVEMENT… AND IN 90 DAYS
In this highly results-driven culture, execution is the key to agile and visible
transformation. I like projects to be results-driven by nature with every
AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2015 | AIRCRAFT IT MRO | CASE STUDY: AIR WORKS | 17
“Itmightbesimplebutit’sveryeffective.ThechecklistwasfirstintroduceddecadesagobytheU.S.AirForce,since
whenchecklistshaveenabledpilotstoflyaircraftofmindbogglingsophistication.”
Air Works Hangar

3. 18 | CASE STUDY: AIR WORKS | AIRCRAFT IT MRO | AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2015
RAVINDER PAL SINGH
GLOBAL CHIEF INFORMATION AND
TECHNOLOGY OFFICER AT AIR WORKS
Ravi is transforming
current IT and creating
its future avatar which
is aligned to Air Work’s
vision and its various
business goals. He has lived and
worked on three continents and
his global experience covers broad
disciplines ranging from strategy
to execution. In the recent past
he has been associated with
a leader in technology and a
‘big 4’ management consulting
firm to help their Fortune 100
customers and government
institutions in IT transformation. He
is a child rights activist, practices
yoga, runs marathons and does
mountaineering. In his personal
capacity, Ravi is also a holder of
several technology patents.
AIR WORKS
Air Works is India’s largest
independent aviation MRO and
India’s first EASA certified MRO. The
company is certified to maintain 96
different types of aircraft – ranging
from small, single engine machines
to turboprops plus Boeing 737s and
Airbus A320s. Air Works includes Air
Livery, UK which is Europe’s leading
independent aircaft painting and
re-finishing company and Empire
Aviation Group, Dubai which is
the Middle East’s largest aircraft
management services company.
INTERACTIVE Give us your opinion
Click here to post your comment
INTERACTIVE Subscribe here
Click here to read all future editions
project producing a result in 90 days. If there’s no result
in 90 days, then we’ll scrap that project, whatever the
rationale behind it. The philosophy within Air Works
IT is that you have to produce results in 90 days.
You don’t get a second chance and there is no excuse
accepted since it has to be results driven. This also helps
in true realizable innovation and differentiates ‘talkers’
from ‘doers’.
GETTING THE BUSINESS CONNECTED
A balanced scorecard should always include elements
of thought processes and decision making. What
then have our quantitative results been? Air Works in
2012 was a zero IT company. In fact, it would be fair
to say, a negative IT company; meaning by which, it
had hangars, line stations and offices which were not
connected with each other. That means supposedly
simple things essential for any IT organization
were not really available. Things, like basic firewall,
basic switches, and decent stable bandwidth. It was
not a connected organization. The second element
contributing to negative IT was that, before 2012, Air
Works had bought an expensive portfolio of products
including a costly collaboration suite of software,
ERP, BI products etc.: however, none was being used
properly with most not even deployed.
So the first challenge was to build an organization
and connect it. We connected over 45 hangars and
digitization growth was not by two or three digits,
but by approximately four-digit numbers. We also
implemented an ERP solution which had become
legacy since it had been bought several years earlier.
Everybody told us that it takes years to implement
ERP, especially the kind of ERP that we needed. But
we implemented our own version of an improved ERP
in three quarters with over 55 different aircraft types
configured — a normal large airline has a maximum of
five or six different types. Today our operations run on
a digital enterprise backbone mostly on elastic cloud.
Since our ERP was legacy and the ERP vendor was
not agile enough to partner us in the project, we
created our own modern digital mobile fabric on
the cloud to connect our customers. We wanted to
introduce transparency for customer to get visibility
for their investments or portfolio, i.e. a consumption
report? Customers should also know how to get their
aircraft utilization report, to see what we are doing on
their aircraft and what activity is underway, etc. We
have many similar examples and case studies ranging
from achieving cloud based collaboration in 90 days to
app-market foundation.
BETTER WORKING TOGETHER
Projects in Air Works are not done by IT alone. People
who work at hangars and line stations whether it’s
an AME (aircraft maintenance engineer), planner,
CAMO expert, quality, store inspector, technician,
administration manager, HR, compliance auditor... the
list goes on, are integral to the technology strategy and
its execution. In addition we have developers, network
experts, etc., all working in the business. Within 90
days, we assemble the people who will be running the
project, write a proposal, accept the proposal, build
the architecture, and push it to production. I use a
modification of several methodologies — the closest
being Agile or maybe a unified Agile approach. But,
everything is aligned to core business result, its value to
non-linear growth.
The trick is to quickly identify and create what I call
a system of records (this might be the exact opposite
of the legacy and classical approach to software
implementation) mapping the organization structure
and its bare minimum transaction and compliance
needs. In this case it was both easy and difficult, as
when I arrived in Air Works, there had already been
a sizeable investment in IT; but most of the portfolio
was either unused or both the IT and user community
were exasperated by its poor execution and lack of
usability. Also, I was new to aviation, hence needed to
understand its culture and complexity. So IT strategy
was a simple matter; first, maximize utilization of the
legacy investment and align it to immediate needs then
second, simultaneously build a platform for the future,
aligned with non-linear growth ambitions.
As I’ve already said above, execution was the key to
success for the strategy. We had to consider how to
make the realization of our strategic objectives possible
(let alone successful) within the constraints of cash and
culture. There was no alternative but to create a culture
of the community as a core execution principle. Thus
social and cloud developed organically as key pillars of
Air Works IT modernization, not because we wanted
it or the whole world was talking about it. Our vision
was simple: to create a unique social fabric which aligns
“…thefirstchallengewastobuildan
organizationandconnectit.Weconnected
over45hangarsanddigitizationgrowth
wasnotbytwoorthreedigits,butby
approximatelyfour-digitnumbers.”
with this sense of community and focuses on who the ‘real’ people are, what
they do, and what ideas they are exchanging; then extending that to their
conversations with customers until it becomes almost a troubleshooting and
information provisioning digital platform with the customer at the core. We
knew that if we could create this, based on easily and economically available
commodity technology, and wrap it over the legacy portfolio system and its
records, we could achieve both goals of the strategy.
FIVE STEPS TO IT ACHIEVEMENT
In all of this, we evolved five elements of social fabric architecture,
which are:
1. Map and identity; i.e. where you are, which aircraft you are working
on, its location, which office you belong to, and what are your
coordinates etc.;
2. Industrial network, sometimes called the IoT (Internet of things) of
RFID, M2M, WSN and little bit of SCADA (supervisory control and
data acquisition): what is your capability, what tools you are working
with, and the proximity of those tools to that particular problem inside
the aircraft etc.;
3. HR-profiling, how you are recognized in terms of your capabilities,
certification, caliber, and so on;
4. Content and searching for it — manuals, designs, transcoding, digital
asset management etc.;
5. Democratic app-market; i.e. the ability to create your own app to solve
and share. Of course, we have applied certain principles, disciplined
guidelines and very strict technology performance specifications, similar
to the marketplace or app markets of Apple or Microsoft or Android, to
balance freedom versus governance.
A LOOK INTO THE FUTURE
Hence there is another space emerging in Air Works via this social
convergence and its digitization which I call ‘Digital Innovation Space’.
My prediction and bet is that very soon this may become one of the main
business lines of Air Works and in years to come may very well be its
largest business footprint.
“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction” — Pablo Picasso