San Jose, CA Ñ March 11, 2003 Ñ Air France Industries (AFI) has tapped a solution from Business Objects to allow employees within its operational entities to track, understand and manage key performance indicators that are critical to enterprise performance, and also to offer its customers a supply chain extranet.
With $1.8 billion of turnover, AFI is the commercial organization through which Air France offers aircraft maintenance services to other airlines. AFI is the world's second-ranking multi-product maintenance operator, doing business with some 100 customer airlines worldwide in addition to servicing and maintaining the 252 long- and medium-haul aircraft in the Air France fleet.
"The safety, security and financial issues at stake in aircraft maintenance are considerable," said Jacques Noviant, director of information technology applications at AFI. "With stock inventory worth 960 million euros ($1.1 billion), the need to optimize our logistics process is a constant priority. At the same time, our extranet, called '@Win,' enables our customers to keep track of components that we are repairing or servicing."
AFI deployed this new business intelligence system in less than 10 months. Connected directly to Astre, the specialized enterprise resource planning system for aircraft maintenance, the Business Objects business intelligence environment provides more than 130 dashboards to 1,000 AFI employees worldwide.
For example, the purchasing department has access to analytics of ordered volumes, the contracts and pricing with suppliers, and the quality of their services with an automatic rating system. Tracked over time, this data provides an objective basis for future negotiations with suppliers.
The Business Objects solution also tracks the value of the inventory for each facility, and AFI uses the solution to do component flow analysis in order to refine such factors of inventory control as geographical proximity of certain facilities and inactive inventory detection.
Engineering, at the core of AFI's know-how and added-value, uses the software to perform statistical studies on component reliability and the tracking of maintenance policy. Finally, at the production logistics level, the solution is helping to improve the management of component flow and enables shop workload evaluation based on ongoing repair status.
"In our business, it is vital to react fast to stay competitive," said Noviant. "The Business Objects environment gives us the big picture and enables us to analyze and anticipate situations better."
In addition, AFI's airline customers use the Business Objects solution to obtain round-the-clock access to the @Win Extranet, enabling them to monitor overhaul and repair orders, component availability and AFI's service-level agreements. The customers can access an immediate overview of work in process, and they can check the quality of AFI's service in real time.
