Honeywell Aerospace

Honeywell's CORBA-based PIPS system provides the capability to record any type of information about its aerospace products from the time they are developed, tested and placed in service, until they are retired. System access is global and is available to users twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.

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Contact:
Honeywell Aerospace
111 South 34^th Street
Phoenix, AZ 85034
www.honeywell.com

Tools Used:
CORBA®, PeerLogic’s LiveContentBROKER, JavaBeans, GUI, C++, Visual Basic for presentation layer, C++ for application logic.
Piloted using NT and HP-UX servers (2 processor) running HP-UX 11.0, linked to Win 95 clients Oracle V7 3.3 Database

Problem:
Honeywell’s aerospace engines, components, and accessories are present on virtually every aircraft in the world. Tracking the operational history of more than 45,000 items, as well as shop floor findings on what causes malfunctions, is a mammoth task, complicated by an intricate organizational structure that crosses international borders.

Close tracking of parts is essential; each time a Honeywell engine or component fails, it can cost Honeywell and its customers significant time and money to assess the failure and remedy it.

The company needed to develop a new IT system to increase productivity, provide more complete and accurate data, insure timely access, reduce warranty costs and engineering investments, and retire five legacy mainframes. Honeywell chose PeerLogic’s LiveContent BROKER™, a CORBA-based, platform-independent solution for component development and application integration. Honeywell’s new system allows more accurate and efficient parts tracking, so that Honeywell can understand the reliability of its products, improve customer service, and maintain its competitive edge.

"When an incident occurs, it is extremely important to almost immediately identify what went wrong and why. Then, our engineering group can take fast corrective actions to prevent further similar events," explained Bruno Wegner, principal engineer in Reliability and System Safety at Honeywell.

Previously, the effort to keep the required data available involved eight different IT systems handling component tracking. The old UNIX and Oracle legacy systems made it difficult to get timely information to those who needed it, was extremely costly, and consumed large amounts of staff time. System users demanded that data be kept up-to-date and accessible.

Solution:
Honeywell wanted to unify the approach to collecting reliability data and generating reports to support the firm’s business objectives of significantly reducing reporting time, cutting costs, and improving customer service.

Honeywell created a Product In-service Performance Support (PIPS) application designed around LiveContentBROKER, which companies rely on to speed time to market for new products, increase development productivity, maintains business continuity, and reduce IT costs.

Honeywell’s PIPS system provides the capability to record any type of information about its aerospace products from the time they are developed, tested and placed in service, until they are retired. This new system records when and where engines and components are installed, details of any failure, when and where they are repaired, and the overall utilization rates of the parts. The tracking of a single part may span decades of use.

Access to all system information is now global, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The PIPS application provides a common database for data collection, analysis and reporting. A graphical user interface (GUI) allows real-time data entry and a data import capability for bulk data loading from legacy data systems and external sources. Information is shared among multiple departments within Honeywell, and customers can access information on their own parts.

"We initially examined various middleware message management options, but culture and platform considerations quickly led us to a distributed object implementation," said Chuck Potts, Project Coordinator at Honeywell, "CORBA was the obvious direction."

LiveContent BROKER enabled the legacy applications to be migrated to more efficient and cost-effective open systems platforms: HP-UX CORBA Server, Microsoft Windows NT ASP Server, Windows 95 clients, and an Oracle database. The import capabilities of LiveContent BROKER permitted easy conversion from the legacy systems to the PIPS database, allowing Honeywell to retire the old mainframes.

The CORBA solution from LiveContentBROKER is helping Honeywell meet its complex challenge to reduce costs and improve operations. For example: one Honeywell employee used to spend a full week each month creating reliability reports; today those reports are done in just one day.

With LiveContentBROKER, Honeywell has streamlined its report-creation and distribution process, improved accuracy and timeliness of data, and simplified access to important information. The new, enterprise-wide distributed solution is positioning Honeywell for improved market growth to maintain its competitive edge.