Airports: Decrease costs and improve profitability as the world returns to work

Operating and maintaining airport assets securely and cost-effectively while complying with FAA, TSA, and local regulations are complex tasks. Whether they’re maintaining terminals, ensuring airfield safety, enhancing the reliability and performance of snow removal equipment, or ensuring that parking structures are accessible, airports face a diverse set of challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic has magnified the challenge of operating efficiently to ensure business continuity.

The maintenance of an airport’s broad constellation of assets requires more than preventive maintenance and a strong customer service focus. Airports need to improve their asset maintenance maturity. By maintaining assets more proactively, airports can improve asset reliability, increase asset life expectancy, provide better services, reduce total cost of ownership, and secure greater levels of FAA funding.

Adopting a more comprehensive asset management approach involves evaluating these areas:

• Which assets are truly most critical to my operation, my customer experience, and the airport’s certification and compliance?
• Which assets are near the end of their lifecycle?
• What repairs can extend that life?
• Is preventive maintenance being performed on time?
• Is my PM program truly extending asset life?
• Are my asset management practices supporting my asset strategy? Are they informing my asset decision making? Can I accurately forecast my capital asset investment needs?
• Which new processes are relatively easy to implement, which require process changes, and which need new technology?
• Which projects should be tackled first?
• Which projects provide the best return on investment?

The Airport Maintenance Maturity Assessment

Infor’s Airport Maintenance Maturity Assessment, offered in partnership with 21Tech, helps airports evaluate their asset management practice. A team of experienced asset management professionals performs a two-to-three day onsite or virtual assessment. We will assess the practices around the asset classes that you choose, depending upon your organizational needs. This could include airfield and pavement, terminal operations and inline baggage, jet bridges, parking structures and ground, fleet including snow removal equipment, landscaping equipment, and more.

The assessment is based on the Institute for Asset Management’s (IAM) Conceptual Asset Management Model. It determines where the airport’s current asset management practices are best supporting their needs and where they can benefit most from improvements to achieve a greater ROI. IAM pioneered the development of the ISO 55001 Asset Management Standard alongside the British Standards Institute.

The Infor assessment benchmarks all the processes, technology, data, and organizational areas in the airport, and the connections between them, that are necessary to support a mature asset management practice. Examples include terminal operations, construction, and facilities maintenance. The assessment then compares the airport’s asset management with its peers and industry best practices to determine whether its practices are functioning at an optimal level. The outcome is a roadmap for future improvements that will boost asset performance.

Understanding asset management challenges in the context of such a model can help airports make the business case for change in any and all areas--especially now when efficient operations are critical.