At Honeywell’s auxiliary power unit (APU) maintenance, repair and overhaul facility in Phoenix, Arizona, technicians wearing headphones seem to be talking to the small turbine engines in their care, and indeed that is exactly what they are doing. During a recent tour of the facility, the largest APU MRO facility anywhere, according to Honeywell, AIN observed Honeywell mechanic Andrew Newingham demonstrating the Vocollect voice inspection solution, which speeds up technical tasks and eliminates reams of paperwork. Honeywell (Booth W089) acquired Vocollect as part of its purchase of Intermec in September 2013.

Newingham works on the APU shop’s induction line, where the engines arrive for initial inspection before moving on to repair and/or overhaul stations. Typically, mechanics pick up a clipboard and go through inspection items one by one, checking off the item and writing down applicable information such as serial numbers, component condition and other observations. After this is done, all of this data has to be entered into Honeywell’s SAP enterprise resource planning software.

Vocollect simplifies and speeds up this process, and the APU induction line is the first application for this system in the aerospace industry, according to Honeywell Aerospace senior program manager Joe Stepanski. Plans call for adopting Vocollect in the rest of the APU MRO functions, which include analytical, materials, assembly, test and shipping.

Newingham demonstrated how he uses the system with an APU that had just entered the induction process. In addition to the Bluetooth headphones, he also clips a controller unit to his belt.

Collecting Data Easily

One of the processes where Vocollect is ideal is writing down a serial or part number from a difficult-to-see location. One such number is buried underneath the APU, and Newingham has to shine a flashlight under the engine and use a magnifying glass to read the numbers. With paper, this can involve a lot of back-and-forth, unless the mechanic has a youthful memory and can recall a long string of characters without having to write some down then return for another look. With Vocollect, Newingham reads off three or four characters at a time, using the phonetic alphabet for letters, but he doesn’t have to look away from the serial number while he’s feeding it directly into the SAP system via Vocollect.

For the induction line, Vocollect begins with a series of questions about the general condition of the APU, followed by serial and part numbers. The Vocollect voice can be set to male or female, and users can speed up or slow down the voice as desired. Newingham demonstrated the typical voice speed that he uses, and it sounds like a busy chief chipmunk instructing a helper on how to gather and prepare an acorn dinner. After listening to the rapid-fire queries from Newingham’s normal Vocollect setting, I could make out about one word in three, but I could easily grasp how this can work as technicians get used to the system and also how it can help speed up these processes. “The efficiency of the mechanic goes way up when they learn [to use the system] at higher speeds,” Stepanski said.

Currently, all the data gathered for this APU is batched with that from other APUs then sent in a package to the SAP system, but eventually it will be updated in real-time so decisions about items that need repair can be made much faster, he explained. There are other advantages to Vocollect, such as driving a consistent workflow. With the old paper-based processes, mechanics would end up developing their own methods of completing the work, and this led to a lot of variability and inefficiency. Mechanics worked closely with engineers to develop the Vocollect processes for the APU induction line and they refined these processes as the implementation took place. For example, early on they found that mechanics were jumping from one area of the APU to another, but now the flow is much more logical and involves many fewer steps. “We’re fine-tuning the process,” Stepanski said.

Another advantage of Vocollect is the ease of adding new questions to the system. Instead of updating a document then making sure every mechanic has the current printout, engineers can quickly insert a new question into Vocollect, and the mechanics will not be able to avoid inspecting that particular item. “Vocollect asks what it needs to know,” he said. If a mechanic misses an item, Vocollect won’t allow completion of the job until that missed item is done. With the former printout system, an item could easily be overlooked.

Vocollect can adapt to foreign accents because users must first train the system to recognize their voices. Setting up the template takes from 40 minutes to an hour, and mechanics can even choose their own terms if they wish, for example, the word “alto” for “stop,” which the computer can easily translate before it outputs the results. “Everybody has taken to Vocollect pretty well,” said Newingham. He also sees many more maintenance opportunities for Vocollect, including airframe inspections.

After expanding to the full APU MRO process, Honeywell plans to add Vocollect to the engine MRO line as well as to other Honeywell Aerospace MRO facilities. o