ARMONK, NY -- Japan Airlines International officially launched "JAL Mighty," a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for aviation maintenance, this November. IBM Japan, IBM Business Consulting Services, and SAP Japan Co. Ltd. collaborated on the project to create a system to manage maintenance planning, quality control, and parts inventory for approximately 160 aircraft, 460 engines, and 500,000 parts. Also equipped with 19 standard SAP modules to serve approximately 6,000 users including aircraft mechanics, the system is the largest ERP system for aviation maintenance in the world.
The new SAP ERP system integrates approximately 100 business systems for maintenance planning, quality control and parts inventory for aircraft, as well as qualification management of aircraft mechanics into one SAP ERP package to realize business processes standardization and real-time information sharing. As a result, operational complexity due to multiple maintenance systems and separate data management is reduced, and management processes of maintenance planning, quality control of aircraft parts inventory are streamlined while improving safety in the air.
SAP ERP for aviation maintenance is implemented at 17 airlines in the world including JAL. For the JAL's world's largest scale system implementation project to date, IBM consultants from 10 countries such as UK, France, and South Africa were brought together to leverage their past experiences in aviation maintenance system implementation at other airlines, and contribute their global insight. In order to minimize technical risks and to prevent issues, this project also adopted SAP MaxAttention™, the ultimate implementation support service provided by SAP, which was created by a global team of experts including during the design phase developers from SAP's headquarters in Germany.
During the JAL project, IBCS provided consulting services for business process standardization and operational transformation to support adjustment to the new ERP package system, while collaborating with JAL and IBM Japan in system development. Part of program development was done jointly by IBM India and IBM Japan development centers.
