The Situation
A global air cargo and charter airline operator flies 86 wide-body Boeing aircraft: 767s, 747s, and 777s. The fleet runs a mix of cargo, passenger charter, VIP operations, and military airlift. Many of the aircraft are passenger-to-freighter conversions, which means supplemental type certificates, modified illustrated parts catalogs, and configuration rules that differ from the original OEM baseline.
For the engineering team, maintaining accurate configuration across that fleet consumed weeks of manual effort every time Boeing issued a parts catalog revision. Engineers had to cross-reference each revision against the maintenance ERP system, validate part numbers across multiple fleet types and configurations, identify obsoleted or superseded parts, and update the system accordingly. The same rotable components appear across fleet types, voice recorders and flight data recorders among them, but each carries different effectivity rules depending on the modification status of the tail number.
Two problems compounded each other. First, the sheer volume of data made manual validation impractical. Second, discrepancies between what the OEM documentation listed as allowable and what the maintenance ERP system showed as installed triggered an internal corrective action program under the airline's CASS (Continuing Analysis and Surveillance System). Parts were being installed without confirmed authorization for that specific tail number and position.
They needed to validate the allowable configuration for every tail number in the fleet, audit certification documentation for in-scope components, and do it inside a 30-day window before each aircraft's heavy maintenance visit.