Transforming scheduled maintenance processes on 700 Aircraft Using Alteryx

[kklc24]

Author:

Kimberly Rooney

Role:

Associate Data & Decision Scientist

Company:

Southwest Airlines

Overview of Use Case

Using Alteryx, I was able to piece together a near real time picture of all scheduled maintenance on over 700 aircraft and publish the data to Tableau Server to update dashboards every 10 minutes. Our maintenance planners, Network Operations Center, and station managers now have a single source of truth to be better aligned on scheduled tasks.

Describe the business challenge or problem you needed to solve

Our fleet of over 700 aircraft live in multiple maintenance systems and getting a comprehensive view of where all the labor, parts, and aircraft are scheduled to be among ever-changing operations is difficult. This was calculated by hand, compiled in excel, and distributed via email to stations across our network multiple times a day. We needed a way to automate real time data, manage labor levels across the network, and publish a single source of truth for maintenance data for our stakeholders in the Maintenance Planning Department, Network Operations Center and the station managers. 

Describe your working solution

Using scheduled aircraft maintenance data housed in oracle databases and in-house excel spreadsheets, we processed in Alteryx Designer and built Tableau dashboards publishing to Tableau server.

Related Resources

Describe the benefits you have achieved

Along with increased employee efficiency and satisfaction, our customer satisfaction has increased with less negative impact on flying customers due to better scheduled maintenance oversight. We have also benefitted from time savings and decreased cost due to better management of labor and less overtime accrued at stations plus an improvement in station readiness for incoming work.

I feel like an equal to my programmer and developer counterparts. I don't even have a degree, but I made something that changed scheduled maintenance for my company forever.

When considering the future of analytics at my company, I am most excited about tool development. The ability to avoid unnecessary additional technology costs and build in-house solutions that help the company is empowering.

[jacob_kahn]

I’m a pilot in training and love the aviation industry. This use case is so impressive. Kudos!

Jacob