FEAM Aero is preparing to roll out several accelerated digital transformation initiatives at the beginning of 2025. The MRO provider is also evaluating use cases for artificial intelligence as it eyes more technology opportunities.
Led by Vice President of Technology Joseph Hernandez, FEAM has spent the past year designing a technology road map and getting buy-in from its staff.
“As technologists, so often we sit in a room and say, ‘Here’s how you have to solve a problem because that’s what best practices say,’ but that’s not the case half the time. Even if you feel that you’re right about something, you have to sit in the room and put the people first. You have to figure out what their actual needs are and then present solutions that meet those needs,” says Hernandez. “At the end of the day, if what you have in mind is not something that the business is willing to embrace at the time, then you have to move in a different direction.”
On Jan. 1, 2025, FEAM will be replacing its legacy systems for finance, accounting, human resources and enterprise resource planning (ERP) with the Workday ERP system.
As the company has started looking at getting into heavy maintenance, it has also been evaluating several MRO software systems this year. FEAM plans to do an accelerated implementation of its selected system by the end of this year.
The new software will help FEAM as it works toward its goal of becoming totally paperless. To prepare its maintenance staff for a more digital environment, the company has over the last year implemented a Digital 407 (D407) project that replaces a form used to track maintenance labor hours with a digital version.
According to Hernandez, FEAM’s growth over the past few years had led to a loss of standardization with 407 forms across its various global locations. “Over time we started to figure out what our different variations were and where we needed to make accommodations for all these different locations,” he says. “At the same time, we also started mapping out the process and doing a little bit of process improvement while developing this form.”
FEAM designed the D407 form to look like a piece of paper to simplify the process—particularly for employees that felt averse to learning a new system. Employees simply type or use speech to text to enter information on the form. Hernandez says FEAM has 100% adoption of D407 throughout the organization, and the application will be integrated with its new ERP system.
Beyond paperless operations, FEAM has also started evaluating opportunities for artificial intelligence (AI) in different areas of the business. However, Hernandez says the company is taking a careful approach to AI’s hype cycle to avoid overinvestment.
“I have this conversation with the executives all the time: ‘Do you want to be on the cutting edge or do you want to be a fast follower?’ Unless you are absolutely certain it’s going to give you a competitive advantage, it’s important to be a fast follower, because sometimes I think you can end up overcommitting or overextending yourself on a certain initiative and that will end up tripping you up down the road,” says Hernandez.
FEAM has brought in key partners specialized in data governance, security and privacy, which Hernandez stresses is important in an industry that is still highly paper-driven. “Even if that paper gets scanned and turned into a digital document, it’s still unstructured,” he says, adding that FEAM must ensure it understands what data it has and where the value is, structure the data and begin to put controls around it.
For example, FEAM’s new maintenance hangar at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport features an AI-powered camera system that can be used for safety, security and heat mapping to see how much usage its maintenance bays are getting. FEAM is still testing the system with the vendor to ensure it has normalized data that it can extract the most value from. Hernandez says FEAM is also in conversations with a company that uses computer vision and AI to track resource usage.
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