Mxi Unifies Maintenance with Maintenix

The goal of Mxi Technologies's Maintenix maintenance software system (www.mxi.com) is both simple and broad: "We want to unify all of the aspects of the MRO management process into a single IT platform," said Matt Tobin, vice president of marketing and alliances. "I believe that Maintenix does an exceptional job of doing this; especially when it comes to handling some of the more difficult dimensions of the MRO process."

If this sounds hard to believe, then one might want to review the customers that have selected Maintenix from its Ottawa, Canada maker. They include Delta Air Lines, Qantas, Air Canada, NetJets, Boeing, Rolls-Royce, Dassault, Bombardier Aerospace, Executive Jet Management, and the U.S. Navy.

Maintenix is comprised of a series of software modules, each of which handles an aspect of the MRO process. These modules interconnect, allowing the Maintenix user to maintain a central database for supplies in inventory, supplies consumed, and work in progress. Overall, Maintenix is designed to improve aircraft availability for an MRO's clients; improve the planning of scheduled maintenance visits; reduce an MRO's parts inventory while improving supply chain management; make the MRO more efficient; and reduce delays and cancellations.

There are six modules within the Maintenix package,

Line Maintenance, Heavy Maintenance, Shop Maintenance, Maintenance Engineering, Material Management, and Fleet Management.

� Line Maintenance: This module covers maintenance control, line station planning and scheduling, and execution of line maintenance work within the MRO. It also includes real-time diagnostic and prognostic analysis features and the ability to spot and help manage line maintenance discrepancies.

� Heavy Maintenance: Visit planning, production planning and control, and the execution of heavy maintenance tasks are the focus of this module. It comes with heavy check templates for ensuring that jobs are being done to spec and progress monitoring for jobs in progress.

� Shop Maintenance: This module helps the shop manager plan, control, and execute MRO tasks. Applicable in both component and complex assembly shops, the Shop Maintenance module provides up-to-the-minute visibility of each job's material requirements.

� Maintenance Engineering: This Maintenix module provides the user with maintenance program definition and management, organization modeling, configuration management, record-keeping, reliability analysis, and engineering support including recommended corrective actions and engineering authorizations.

� Material Management: Cradle-to-grave data for tracked and serialized parts is the emphasis of this module. It also handles demand planning and order fulfillment, material requisitions, asset induction, quality control, warranty information, warehouse management, shipping, and material routing.

� Fleet Management: This module helps MROs collect and manage intelligence and planning data, so that they can get a good view of all activities within their organization and develop effective policies before problems occur.

Collectively, Maintenix's six modules provide MROs with an integrated, systematic method for managing their operations. To improve this capability, Maintenix software also supports electronic signatures for work sign-off, wireless data transmission, the ability to interface to external IT systems, and it includes a report modeling package known as the Maintenix Report Development Kit.

Maintenix is accessed via a Web-style interface and is compliant with the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) standard. Maintenix can also be interfaced with financial and human resources databases and SAP and Oracle ERP systems.

In addition to the companies noted above, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines recently purchased the Maintenix software package. "KLM had a requirement for MRO software tools designed to support our internal processes and to provide engineering services to its external airline customers," said Paul van Westerhoven, director engineering at KLM Engineering & Maintenance. "Maintenix met all of these requirements. KLM now has the tools to better manage our maintenance programs and planning processes, for the benefit of our own MRO operations and the support of our customers."

Lockheed Martin also purchased Maintenix for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. Maintenix will serve as the commercial maintenance management system component of the F-35's autonomic logistics information system. The software will provide "capabilities for asset management, maintenance program management, maintenance planning and scheduling, configuration control, and work execution," according to a Lockheed Martin statement. -- By James Careless