What is the battery level of the specified electric ground support equipment (GSE) unit? When should the battery be charged? When should the GSE be maintained or replaced? Is there enough GSE or is there too much equipment in one gateway? Are there enough personnel on the ground? What do flight return times look like in real time? If a flight is delayed, who is responsible and where is the delay?
To help answer these questions, estate service providers of all sizes are using asset management technology.
“Asset management at its most basic level is the process of tracking, maintaining, upgrading and retiring operational assets over the course of their respective life cycles,” said Santosh Nachu, general EBIS software manager at Tronair.
“EAM [Enterprise Asset Management] The systems allow the collection of various measures and management of the aforementioned processes through modules such as maintenance tracking, work order management, warranty management, inventory management, etc.”
Optimization is the desired outcome of any well-run asset management program, Nachu said. For example, how many GSE assets of a type are needed to minimize the total cost of ownership (TCO), while also ensuring a desired level of asset uptime and availability to service the volume in turns like? What combination of preventive maintenance schedules, parts catalogs and labor hours spent on a GSE piece extends its life, while also keeping costs below the price of acquiring a new one? the GSE?
“Asset management, in and of itself, does not provide optimization,” says Nachu. “However, the ability to accurately and reliably collect data from a variety of sources, both human and machine, contextualize it to generate metrics that matter to the organization; and apply industry best practices and policies to control these metrics are necessary conditions to achieve optimization.”
Nachu says that optimal asset management is a journey that begins with identifying and tracking assets.
“Once a repository of assets is identified and can be updated over time, the objective can act to better understand the condition of these assets by accurately measuring various inputs such as usage, explained time between failure, labor cost, parts cost, productivity, etc..,” said Nachu. “After getting the right measures, they can be converted into specific metrics into dynamic parameters and constraints used to optimize functions such as total cost of ownership, fleet size, fleet lifecycle.”
Under the brand name XOPS, Resonate MP4 develops airport and airline ground handling solutions, including fleet (motorized and non-motorized), operations and data management systems, as well as vehicle access control. .
“In general, customers are looking to gain efficiencies for their own benefit or the benefit of their customers,” said David Read, general manager of Resonate MP4.
Traditionally, an operations manager might review a monthly report produced by several people who collect data. Read says that doesn’t matter now.
“People want to know in real time what’s going on,” he said. “Am I returning 100 percent of my flights on time today? If not, where are the differences?”
Keeping a digital record of activities is becoming more common.
“Commercial contracts always require strong SLA evidence [service level agreement] performance,” said Read.
The benefits of digital asset management are many.
According to Matthias Moulinier, product director for ADVEEZ, better knowledge of the use and maintenance of GSE can increase the lifetime and performance of assets, prevent accidents through better maintenance and safer driving and reduce asset reduction by keeping vehicles running longer.
The benefits also include a safer working environment, cost savings from energy and fuel management, better and safer driver training and reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
As aircraft turnover and rotation increases at most airports around the world, Moulinier said it is important for ground handlers to improve operations and safety during transfers. But the most important thing is to get reliable data that can be used immediately to be reactive during actions, he explained.
“Finding the right GSE quickly for the right gates at the right moment is critical to being efficient during perfectly timed operations,” Moulinier said. “Accurate and real-time information on assets is essential, especially during final changes to aircraft.”
According to Read, common questions about asset management technology include “How can technology help land service providers improve their business?” and “How will savings from efficiencies be passed on to the airlines they work for?” Then, he said there were more specific requirements.
“Can you reduce how much fuel I use, or can you help me manage my green commitments/emissions, or can you improve safety? How can I make my staff more efficient and/or assets?” he said.
“We have some smaller, more specialized customers with less assets (vehicles, GSE and non-motorized equipment) but they require a high level of precision, performance and consistency for operation,” Read continued, noting examples of special needs could include airplane fueling, air conditioning and catering. “Being able to digitally report in real time, record and audit accurate information on the times of arrival and departure from the aircraft’s turning area, as well as the exact contents provided by the aircraft is essential for to meet contractual performance.”
Telematics and More
Asset management allows fleet managers to increase asset utilization and value over time to get the best ROI. However, Moulinier explained, telematics systems, often placed directly on the asset, are the hardware that connects and transmits critical data from an asset to a cloud or web platform.
Elements of telematics technology have been used by some airlines and ground handlers for a decade or more, according to Read, the increasing use of the technology has gone beyond the basics of locating a vehicle on a map. .
“Finally, you need to know more detail, down to the nearest meter or half a meter where the car is, who’s driving it, how fast it’s going – all this information in real time ,” said Read.
The introduction of electric GSE has created a new need for asset management technology.
“It’s easy to estimate how much fuel is in a car,” Read pointed out. “It’s not that easy to estimate remotely and accurately how much battery a car has left.”
Today, Read sees a need for more granular enriched data than it did 5 or 10 years ago.
“And 5 or 10 years ago the technology couldn’t provide that much data,” he said.
Examples of sophisticated functionality highlighted in Nachu include the ability to:
• Ingest telemetry data and use it for setting accurate maintenance schedules or determining component life;
• Get real-time cost and parts availability data through direct integration with suppliers to help streamline parts forecasting, costing and ordering;
• Visualize asset performance data or push it in real time to other dashboarding tools through application programming interfaces (APIs).
ADVEEZ has recently introduced new features to Localeez, its web platform. For example, to help increase safety, the mobile app includes an OSHA checklist. There is also a GSE driving score that indicates, in real time, driving style including harsh stops or turns, heavy acceleration or acceleration.
In order to meet accreditation guidelines such as Airport Carbon Accreditation or achieve carbon management goals in compliance with the Paris Agreement, ADVEEZ maps, tracks and monitors the main GHG emissions from motorized assets. The GHG emissions reports provide NOx, CO2, HC, PM, CO emissions per division, per motorized assets over a period of time. Idle and working time reports to monitor unnecessary motor use of the asset and reduce emissions.
Access control or speed control via geofence features are available as options.
“ADVEEZ designed its Localeez platform geofence zones to be active in real time,” Moulinier said. “One of them automatically controls the speed of the GSE and it is usually pulled around the aircraft at the gate. The reliable and real-time data allows (users) to automatically reduce the speed of the approach of the aircraft with a meter accuracy. At the pedestrian speed around the plane (5km/h), we avoided many GSE accidents that happened before on the ground. With this technology, the working environment is definitely safer for everyone.”