ATP’s ChronicX Upgrade Delivers Custom Defect Alerts

MRO Americas, Orlando, FL: Aircraft Technical Publishers (ATP) used MRO Americas to announce Custom Alerting, a new customer-driven addition to its ChronicX Solution that enables the automatic detection and management of chronic and critical defects.

The company’s vice-president of sales, Steve Lightstone, explained that this new Version 2.0 of ChronicX goes beyond simply bringing together defect reports identified by ATA codes. “It adds the ability to define rules for alerts through text searches in the Description field and/or the Corrective Action field. It then sends and e-mail to the user when a rule is met,” Lightstone elaborated.

In those two fields, ChronicX can now find synonyms to identify recurring problems, for example when a problem with nose landing gear is not just entered as those three words, but also as “nlg” or “nose gear”. Lightstone confirmed that the dictionaries for these synonyms are constantly being updated.

The VP also highlighted that there is a regulatory element to the benefits of ChronicX 2.0. “The regulator watches for missed recurring defects and will write to an operator when it sees this happening. The issuing of multiple letters can lead to financial penalties for the operator,” Lightstone explained.

“One customer, which implemented ChronicX in August last year had previously received a number of letters from the FAA. Since implementation, the airline has had no letters at all,” Lightstone remarked. “In the carrier’s business case for acquiring ChronicX, they saw the possibility of reducing the number of FAA letters but also saw the operational benefits, though they expected those to be less than the FAA letters situation. Now they report that the operational benefits are greater.”

At present, ATP has 14 operators signed up for ChronicX, with more than 2,000 aircraft covered by the system. “We expect that number to be around 5,000 by the year end,” Lightstone commented.

Among those customer operators are two of the USA’s big four as well as three flag carriers in other parts of the world. And although customers have not yet given permission to disclose their identities, Lightstone reported that they are clearly discussing ChronicX between themselves, as ATP has been approached by a number of other airlines interested in becoming customers.

By Bernie Baldwin, Editorial Contributor.

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