Ravinala Airports is the concession company in charge of managing the Antananarivo and Nosy Be international airports. It involves four international shareholders: Meridiam, the ADP International Group, Bouygues Bâtiment International and Colas.
This major player was selected as a result of an international call for tender launched by the Malagasy State. The scope of this concession management includes the operation, maintenance, development and funding of these two airports for a period of 28 years, as of December 2016. More than a company, Ravinala Airports is a key player in Madagascar’s economic development.
Despite a postponed opening – initially scheduled for the spring of 2020 – due to Covid-19, the ambition to become one of the leading airport operators in the Indian Ocean remains unchanged. To achieve this objective while meeting the demands of the authorities and renewing its maintenance guarantees with its suppliers and installers, Ravinalaans Airports acquired an effective CMMS.
Performance obligations
Saif Ben Ammar, Maintenance Director, and his team, embarked on the modernisation of methods in September 2018. A reorganisation of Ravinala Airports took place at the end of 2019, along with the redefinition of the maintenance plan’s strategy, involving the refocusing of maintenance activities, in particular by outsourcing certain contracts, prioritising maintenance equipment categories with respect to the scope of activity and departments participating in maintenance.
Mr Ben Ammar explains: “As part of the concession agreement with the Malagasy State, Ravinala Airports is required to submit monthly performance indicators against equipment availability rates. The CMMS is consistent with this approach, via the implementation of automated mechanisms”.
The maintenance scope includes the 3 terminals of Antananarivo (national terminal, current international terminal, new international terminal) as well as the cargo area and general aviation. It also encompasses the Nosy Be terminal. The CMMS focuses on the new international terminal, the pilot site of the activity. It will subsequently be extended to the old terminals.
A detailed definition of maintenance levels and equipment
Equipment categories are subdivided into electromechanical equipment (baggage sorting, boarding bridges, lifts, automatic doors), strong electric currents (transformers, inverters, cells, etc.), air conditioning (air handling, air conditioning units, etc.) and public access buildings. Level 1 maintenance has been integrated into the CMMS. The agents follow the checklist via a withdrawal slip each week.
“In most Level 2 & 3 maintenance cases, an agreement is entered into with the supplier. For bridges for example, we have extensive quarterly inspections of various checkpoints, or technical support through video conferences. Serious breakdowns are resolved within 72 hours at the latest. Corrective actions are tracked in the CMMS. Of course this affects the availability rate” explains Mr Ben Ammar.
The CMMS must be sustained
Building on his experience in the airport sector, Mr Ben Ammar set up a Methods hub to support the CMMS. The maintenance team (approximately forty staff) features an on-site multi-technical maintenance manager, and another one for methods, subcontracting, strategy and planning. This second manager is aided by an assistant in charge of coordinating the CMMS, making sure work orders are completed, resolving any bugs and liaising with DIMO Maint support and IT.
Lastly, the team also includes an energy maintenance manager. According to Mr Ben Ammar: “The difficulty in implementing a CMMS lies primarily in its coordination. The first week is very time consuming as everything is falling into place – integration of the tree structure, equipment, validation process, rights management, etc. – but it is a critical step for our business. It is crucial to assign an individual to the launch on a full-time basis, in particular to hold consultations, review the history, monitor the equipment, etc.” .
Maintenance as negotiating leverage
“Many tasks are internalised, except for baggage sorting – the airport’s hypersensitive core business – for which we monitor KPIs and which is fully outsourced. Agreements have been integrated into the CMMS, including expiry dates and pop-up notifications at the time of renegotiations, a feature that was not available within legal services”.
The CMMS is used for preventive and corrective maintenance as well as the monitoring of over twenty agreements. The airport must assure the manufacturer, upon building acceptance, that maintenance is performed in accordance with the recommendations of suppliers and installers, so that warranty coverage applies. The CMMS provides negotiating leverage to merge several agreements and optimise the budget allocated to maintenance tasks.
With MX: the choice of a tried and tested solution
The solution initially used by the airport was developed locally by a DIMO Maint agent. It was preferable not to disrupt the system and maintain its basic principles.
“The presence of representatives close to the ground (Reunion) was also reassuring to us. In addition, providing a virtual solution in SaaS mode allowed us to reduce hardware investment while securing our operating procedures, all the more so in light of the island’s well-developed fibre backbone. Flexibility of use was an important criterion for the teams. The interface is user-friendly, the tree structure was jointly developed, while the creation of work orders and files, the closure, validation and archiving process were quickly integrated” points out Mr Ben Ammar.
Just-in-time inventory management thanks to the X3 connector
Mr Ben Ammar expects the X3 connector to improve just-in-time inventory management and planning, to avoid keeping obsolete parts in stock for example. The objective is also to better plan for needs and optimise costs, based on a lean management strategy, by the end of 2020. ERP and the Financial Hub will steer operations, in accordance with the nomenclature pre-established by maintenance to avoid overlaps.
Benefits on three levels
With hindsight, Mr Ben Ammar has identified 3 key beneficial effects resulting from the use of MX:
- Ability to anticipate maintenance needs: in particular by improving the preventive/corrective ratio. Originally 40-60, this ratio is now 70-30 thanks to the CMMS and the maintenance plan. “The cockpit has given us real-time vision.
- Economic gain: the CMMS provides a view of all maintenance tasks to be performed. While the ROI has yet to be determined – this will be achieved by mid-2021, with the need to take into account the impact of Covid-19 on figures – savings in time, and therefore money, have been reported and staff can be reassigned accordingly.
- Visibility on the service life of equipment: maintenance and repair have economic and operational effects. “With the historical monthly and annual data provided by the CMMS, we can revise the maintenance plan and recalibrate the financial model relating to equipment”.
