Airplane Maintenance App
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Company
FEAM
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Role
Design of the ePlanner App
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Stakeholders
3 engineers,PM
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Tools
Figma
About
FEAM Aero is one of the MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Who? Operation) leaders in Aircraft Line Maintenance Engineering in the U.S. FEAM worked with an old fashion application to upload documents, check the flight schedules, review their planning tasks and workloads.
I joined the project to create an ePlanner after initial research was conducted by stakeholders.
Project overview
The problem
FEAM's employees were annoyed of having to rely on paper forms on their daily activities.
Airplane maintenance tasks are time sensitive and employees had to work with and complete time-consuming paperwork filling during and after each task.
The solution
A portal to have access to a live flightboard, plan the workload, access workload records and upload and save documents digitally.
Currently, this portal is used by FEAM employees in their daily activities.
Ideation
Goal
I wanted to understand the main functionalities airplane technicians and managers needed to access to be able to accomplish their daily tasks.
Results
Based on iterative discovery sessions with users and stakeholders, I created a navigation user flow with the main sections users need to work with.
Design library
Consistency accross all FEAM's apps
I developed a design components library based on the ePlanner.
The design library was highly accepted by the team and was adopted as the source of truth for all digital projects.
ePlanner functionalities
Permission roles
Learnt that customers, managers and technicians needed to access different functionalities of the ePlanner.
Introduced different app functionalities based on the permission level of each users. For e.g: managers could enter their work time and also see other people's work hours while employees could only access their own.
Workload plan access
Technicians and managers wanted to see their assigned tasks and organize their time efficiently.
Created a plan workload section where users can access their daily tasks and enter specific information for each task.
Timesheets
Users needed to enter their hours based on their specific work tasks.
Introduced a timesheet for users to enter their time work in tasks and aircrafts.
Frictionless document upload
Since technicians had multiple tasks in different airplanes on the same day, it was common to misplace and lose physical airplane documents.
Introduced an easy upload section for technicians to upload and save work documents.
Work documents view
Managers were handling physical task documents to technicians each day, which got lost and misplaced.
Created documents view modals where users could see the documents managers uploaded in their tasks.
Final Result
The ePlanner serves as an essential daily tool for FEAM employees, enabling them to efficiently manage their work tasks, track incoming flights, and document their shift activities.
Takeaways
Industry insight
This project was an enlightening journey into the complexities of the aviation maintenance industry, an area previously unfamiliar to me. It highlighted the critical importance of timely and precise airplane maintenance, underscoring the significance of urgent and time-regulated tasks. This experience broadened my perspective, teaching me the value of adaptability and in-depth industry knowledge in crafting user-centric design solutions for highly specialized fields.