Equipment Tracking System

Lifetime monitoring of stock levels

We build systems for our customers for monitoring the maintenance tasks required for all manner of stored components and equipment, from engines to life jackets. Both regular tasks in the maintenance programme and special tasks required by the storage facility are taken into account. Additionally, the system supports the application and monitoring of service bulletins. The system is integrated with a command system for the control of flight operations in order to automatically record the remaining lifespans of the components associated with the maintenance tasks at the time of storage.

The web browser-based system offers an inventory browser as a core function, through which stored components can be found using a variety of search terms. The inventory browser not only considers static attributes of the parts, but also offers a minimum requirements option for maintenance-free cycles in their installed condition. In the case of pending maintenance tasks, the system creates conventionally generated work orders as printable documents or, optionally, issued on a mobile device for technical processing.

Challenges

The mobile client, which was to be used for the automatic recording of parts, had to be able to handle various electronically readable codes and, in the worst case, be able to fall back on optical text recognition. It had to be ensured, depending on the function, that airworthiness would not be impaired in the event of a failure. Finally, all system components had to comply with a security concept for severely restricted and regulated IT environments.

Resolution method

We first identified the customer’s existing procedures together with them. This was followed by several parallel activities – on the one hand, a bottom-up implementation of the interfaces to external systems of the data model and the functions based on it and, on the other hand, top-down user interfaces were designed and implemented on the end devices. The results were iteratively validated by engineering releases carried out on short notice.

Technologies

Java, Spring Boot, Spring Data, Vaadin, Oracle, iOS, Swift, Tesseract, SSL Client Certificates