FAA Accelerates Rulemaking and Certification

Customer Profile

The FAA’s 48,000 employees are responsible for ensuring the safety of U.S. air travelers through civil air regulations, inspections, incident response, and the air traffic control system.

Business Situation

FAA’s regional Aircraft Evaluation Groups needed to accelerate and streamline operations, increase corporate knowledge security, reduce costs, and prepare for new ISO process measurement standards.

The Story

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is responsible for ensuring the safety of U.S. air travelers. The FAA’s 48,000 employees control approximately 200,000 takeoffs and landings per day and move nearly 700 million commercial air passengers per year. The agency’s responsibilities include civil air regulations, incident response, and the air traffic control system.

Empowering AEGs

The FAA has five regional Aircraft Evaluation Groups (AEG), each with about 60 highly experienced technical professionals. AEGs establish operating criteria for new and modified aircraft and develop maintenance procedures and other regulations mandated by federal regulations.

To earn ISO certification, the AEGs needed to produce their airworthiness reviews faster and streamline external industry collaboration. (ISO is the Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization.)

To address the needs of the AEGs, FAA created AEG Central, which consists of a home site and 100 associated team sites linking the five regional AEG offices. These virtual workspaces are available 24 hours a day, from any location through a secure Internet connection. They enable collaboration of dispersed teams, centralize management and retention of documents, make policy and procedural documents more accessible, and offer effective reporting tools.

For example, SharePoint Lists and Web Parts enable quick reporting of work in progress and accomplishments to date. Using pull-down menus to filter results, lists of Airworthiness Directives can be generated according to aircraft type, manufacturer, state of completion, and other attributes and can be traced to the office who generated them. These are invaluable tools for resource management and budgeting.

Proprietary Business Processes

Much of the FAA’s proprietary rule-making and certification work proceeds according to strictly defined business processes. Workflow helped to ensure the proper process flows and oversight within various business processes.

External Collaboration

In addition to internal processes, there are processes in which external collaboration is necessary. For example, the Maintenance Review Board (MRB) requires a methodical assessment of all maintenance requirements for all newly certified aircraft, such as the Boeing 777 and Boeing 787. MRBs can involve collaboration among manufacturers, airlines, and the FAA.

With SharePoint, the MRB and all subordinate working groups have electronic team sites on which members can participate in technical discussions, develop meeting agendas, create action items and assign responsibility for follow-up. Meetings take place several times annually prior to introduction of a new plane, and once per year after the aircraft is certified. All documents—presentations, position papers, meeting minutes, attendee lists, and supporting data—are stored in document libraries on the team site. In addition to providing a convenient workspace, these team sites capture the entire history of an aircraft’s maintenance rules in a searchable electronic format that is much more easily secured than paper records and which can be retained long after board members’ tenures expire.

Process Measurement and Accountability

AEG employees used to rely on paper, email, telephone, and centralized meetings to manage business processes that contain complex workflows involving thousands of documents and many contributors. To earn ISO certification for five of these processes, the AEGs had to produce formal records of objectives, timelines, and accomplishments that prior to using SharePoint were buried somewhere in paper files or electronic databases kept by each individual AEG office. The SharePoint platform allows for the reporting of important data and performance metrics.

Safeguarding Corporate Knowledge

FAA employees process vast amounts of information. AEGs alone generate and review thousands of documents annually. The accumulated knowledge base represents decades of time and thousands of man-hours of effort. Managing and protecting this priceless corporate knowledge used to rely heavily on paper-driven processes. SharePoint allows for electronic management and retention of documents and makes the updated versions accessible to all employees—no more updating three-hole-punch binders.

Cost Savings

FAA needed to consolidate and streamline operations wherever possible to conform to budgetary changes. For example, AEG boards needed ways to achieve their objectives without requiring frequent travel. SharePoint enables communication and collaboration without physical proximity, so teams don’t have to be in the same room to share information and make progress on their work.

For information about what AKG and a SharePoint collaboration solution can do for your organization, contact us.