Soaring toward safer skies with remote engine monitoring

With more than 42,000 GE engines flying around the world, an aircraft with a GE Aerospace engine takes off every two seconds. Over the course of each flight, the engine collects multiple data snapshots, generating over 480,000 data records per day. And every year, the company's engines generate 150,000 alerts and faults that must be resolved quickly and accurately to ensure engine health and performance.

But that's not all. Each engine's in-flight sensors capture over 300 parameters across flight phases and environmental conditions and then transmit the scattered data in multiple modes and formats, making the alert disposition process highly complex.

To meet its customer expectation of near-to-real-time insights on engine health and resolve maintenance issues quickly, the company needed an end-to-end service that would proactively make engine troubleshooting and maintenance seamless.

Our relationship with GE Aerospace in fleet support management has been strong for nearly ten years. So, we understood the company's culture and operations well enough to dive right in.

The company's engine product line team joined forces with our remote monitoring and diagnostics squad to develop a proactive monitoring service that:

1. Standardizes high-velocity flight data on a bedrock of digitized message definitions and solid parsing logic to more accurately sort and solve alerts
2. Diagnoses the root cause of an engine's performance drop by analyzing historical data and monitoring data deviations within an hour of an alert. The monitoring operation runs 24/7
3. Eliminates false positives and provides technical recommendations for scheduling maintenance to end customers (airliners) on a near-to-real-time basis
4. Automates processes using a digital rule engine to validate engineer disposition and eliminate bias
5. Provides feedback loops into alert algorithms to improve abnormality detection in engine performance

Over the past year, Genpact's monitoring team, partnered with GE Aerospace's product line teams, has issued over 24,000 customer notification reports, alerting on-site technicians and maintenance personnel about what's wrong with the engine and recommending troubleshooting steps during the maintenance period. These monitoring services have quickly and correctly identified and helped solve engine-related performance issues with an 85% success rate. It has helped the company successfully avoid more than 2,500 disruptions through proactive monitoring that could have resulted in potential flight delays.

During this initiative, we've helped GE Aerospace identify mechanical or electronic failures before they happened, increasing an aircraft's time on wing, improving maintenance scheduling, and protecting passenger safety and the company's revenue.

In the future, we plan to leverage the same data to help improve connected enterprise operations and boost supply chain resilience with machine learning and artificial intelligence. Our collaboration with GE Aerospace is a powerful example of how remote engine monitoring can help create safer skies and better businesses for engine fleet operators.