1 Evaluation of Aircraft Maintenance Operations Using Process Measures

This research focuses on the development of a proactive system (a Web-based Surveillance and Auditing Tool WebSAT), which promotes standardization in data collection and identifies the contributing factors that impact aircraft safety. This system will document the processes and the outcomes of maintenance activities, make the results more accessible, and reduce future maintenance error rates. WebSAT will capture and analyze data for the different operations involved in surveillance, auditing, and airworthiness directives. To achieve standardization in data collection, data needs to be collected on certain variables which measure maintenance processes. These variables are defined as process measures. The process measures incorporate the response and observation-based data collected during surveillance, audits, and the control of the airworthiness directives. This paper elaborates on the processes that exist in the aviation maintenance work group, the concerns that need to be addressed while identifying the process measures, and the utility of these process measures in conducting data analysis. Once data is captured in terms of these process measures, data analysis can be conducted to identify the potential problematic areas affecting the safety of an aircraft.