Boeing

Boeing [NYSE: BA] Commercial Aviation Services and Royal Brunei Airlines today announced an agreement to install the advanced Boeing Enterprise One^TM software system at the airline by first-quarter 2003. The system will improve the carrier's fleet utilization and decrease its maintenance costs.

The Enterprise One^TM maintenance management system comprises a set of integrated software modules that together provide an enterprise resource-planning tool specifically tailored to the air transport industry. The system is designed to help airlines optimize major support functions such as maintenance planning and scheduling, engineering operations, logistics management, document management and configuration control. Key benefits include reduced overhead costs, better management of inventory and increased airplane availability.

"All the modules of Enterprise One^TM are designed to integrate seamlessly, forming a comprehensive and digitally based management system," said Rich Higgins, vice president of Maintenance Engineering and Publications for Boeing Commercial Aviation Services. "At the same time, the modular design makes it easy for airlines to select just the portions they need to meet their specific requirements."

Under the terms of the contract, Royal Brunei will install four portions of the Boeing Enterprise One^TM system:

• Engineering modules will enable Royal Brunei engineers to track airworthiness directives and service bulletins more efficiently, while greatly reducing the flow time to create, edit and distribute engineering orders, authorizations and fleet directives.
• Logistics modules will support even the heaviest volumes of spare parts procurement and inventory transactions. An advanced management function will allow Royal Brunei to closely monitor the service histories of high-cost components.
• Maintenance modules will allow the airline to streamline regulatory compliance reporting and to tailor maintenance programs for each airplane in its fleet. Among other features, these modules will help Royal Brunei organize maintenance task cards, optimize maintenance schedules, generate work packages and even support bidding of contract work via the Internet.
• A document management product, called the Boeing Portable Maintenance Aid^TM (PMA), will help mechanics at Royal Brunei troubleshoot airplanes. PMA is a digitized library of key technical information that can be loaded into a mechanic's laptop computer for quick access when servicing an airplane in the airport gate environment.

"Our meetings with Boeing identified an excellent fit between our requirements for sophisticated maintenance planning and execution, and the capabilities of the Boeing Enterprise One^TM system,"said Peter Foster, chief executive officer at Royal Brunei. "The use of this state-of-the-art enterprise resource-planning software will contribute to our evolution as a certified maintenance, repair and overhaul facility."

Enterprise One^TM is a growing family of information technology offerings from Boeing Commercial Aviation Services. Product offerings include Allowable Configuration Manager^TM, a software module that centralizes configuration management via a Web browser-based illustrated parts catalog and provisioning files, and an expanding document management system that currently includes PMA and Boeing Digital Technical Documents^TM.