Ground support at airports and air fields is a critical component in ensuring that airplanes fly on time, properly serviced and without mechanical issues. Airport ground support equipment (GSE) helps to fulfill a broad range of services for the aircraft, from cargo loading to beverage services to refueling to fuselage maintenance. To perform these duties quickly and precisely, allowing for speedy equipment turnaround, ground support personnel must act as a well-oiled machine.
Performing airport ground services requires the meticulous setup of components and tools to ensure that quickly inspecting, loading, and maintaining an airplane can be done efficiently and accurately. If a tool is out of place, or unexpected items get in the way of maintenance crews, valuable time can be lost, expensive equipment can be damaged, and flight delays become more and more of a possibility. For these reasons, it’s essential that airport GSE staff have a secure way to store and control important assets.
Tools used to perform airline maintenance are highly specialized, and might cost several thousand dollars to replace if they are broken or lost. Maintenance workers need to know where their everyday equipment is stored, and to be sure that it will be where they expect it to be when they start the workday. Asset management lockers can help protect, control, and store important tools and equipment—and provide management with the knowledge of who has taken what, and when.
With RFID-enabled asset management, items within individual lockers can be tracked, and the appropriate manager alerted based on rules set by the user. Individuals can only access the lockers and assets for which they are authorized. Should anything go missing, audit data will indicate which user last removed it and when. A number of specified users can be assigned to a single locker in order to share an asset, or an individual locker can be assigned to one person. The system can generate reports on locker usage data, to help determine what assets are most used, at what time, and if there are any anomalies.
Multiple units can be set up on a single system, allowing assets to be returned to any locker within the system and increasing efficiency when the airport uses the same tools and equipment across its entire multiple-acre facility.
Running airport GSE services requires solutions that are up-to-the-second efficient, accurate, and auditable. Managing important equipment and tools with RFID-enabled asset management lockers can help increase efficiency by providing consistent knowledge of equipment locations and accessibility, and improve accuracy and auditability by generating reports detailing which users accessed which lockers and when. Managing expensive, delicate, and essential equipment across a massive facility like an airport can be difficult—and asset management solutions can assist with much of the heavy lifting.
