Customer Success Story: Delta Air Lines

Ken Lorow, Manager, TechOps Technology and Innovations, Engineering; and Rick Lewis, RFID Team from Delta Air Lines explain how Descartes RFID technology is helping the air carrier manage equipment and inventory.

Delta’s journey began its RFID journey tracking aircraft wheels. The airline was challenged to track this critical part and needed to ensure they had enough wheels on hand to fulfill operational needs. They implemented RFID for airplane wheels to help ensure backfilling and to maintain inventory levels.

After that initial successful use case, Delta expanded RFID to other logistics issues, such as tool tracking. Ken Lorow explains, “On the logistics side of the house, RFID was a very easy use case to track parts. The Descartes solution ties into the tool system knowing where the parts are, such as the circuit breaker collars. If you lose one, you're able to use RFID to locate it. Every part is critical to the operation and could cause a shutdown or delay.”

“There's a bin flag that allows you to order parts. In the past, you'd have to go around, write them on a piece of paper, and then go order. This was upgraded to barcode scans, but if there wasn't a human to do these barcode scans, then you could be without parts for a long time.”

“Now, with RFID, you can walk in a room, and in 30 seconds to 2 minutes, depending on the size of that area, [the technology] automatically orders the parts, gets those parts back into the pipeline, and on-site a lot faster.”

“We currently track 200,000 life vests, 82,000 O2 generators, and 79,000 emergency equipment items on our fleet," explains Rick Lewis. "Our current program is tracking to a 60-day expiration alert window. We feel that is a very respectable part life utilization! All of our visual date check inspections have been converted to be digital and data-driven with replacements scheduled via the interface within our maintenance scheduling application. We perform maintenance scans every 60-days on each aircraft to confirm and synchronize the ‘as expected’ data with the ‘as flying’ data. This ensures the dataset driving the expirations is current.

"The resulting dataset is used to drive maintenance task planning, long and short-term inventory purchasing, and exposure analysis for compliance for RFID-tagged items. The Descartes application maintains the various configurations that determine what equipment is installed on each aircraft. We have over 200 different configurations we manage across our fleet. The functionality and operator-customizable options within Descartes have been developed for most of our part management scenarios, including subcomponents and multiple inspection interval types. The report-building module supports automated and ad-hoc reporting as well as data-transfer functionality to support interfaces."

“The experience we’ve had with Descartes has been one of the best customer relationships I’ve seen in my 43-year career at Delta," adds Rick Lewis. "We have generally done 2-3 application enhancements per year. Those have been on-budget and on-time."

“The design and development process for enhancements is very thorough and has allowed the platform to be developed with actual airline partners in an operational setting. Descartes has a good understanding of the processes required to maintain an auditable, safe and compliant maintenance program. Descartes is arguably the best-in-class solution for managing RFID-tagged flying components. Our current generation of technicians think this is the way we’ve always done it! We look forward to the next phase of using the application to track other repairable time-controlled components like valves, actuators, and avionics components.”

“We work together as a partnership, and we have a very good community in the RFID space," concluded Ken Lorow. "It is the shared knowledge that we have among our teams that works so well for us. There are so many opportunities ahead of us, whether it's engine shop tracking, component shop tracking, engine stand tracking, or BLE— it’s exciting for us for future use cases.”

“I'm excited about where Descartes takes us in the future for BLE and RFID. Down the path, this opens up more and more opportunities for Delta Air Lines. There are a lot of creative minds that work at Delta Air Lines that can think of how Descartes can help, and how Delta can partner with Descartes going forward. I'm excited about the very near future and the long-term future working with Descartes.”

Descartes RFID technology plays a pivotal role for the air industry to track of key assets throughout logistics operations, enhance inventory management, and ensure compliance with Life-limited Part (LLP) industry standards.

Descartes solutions are revolutionizing traditional manual practices to help airlines ensure stock is continuously available; monitor the location of high-value assets as well as materials for day-to-day operations; and to meet compliance for limited shelf-life parts via a mobile-enabled aircraft walk-through. We’re helping the air sector speed operations and remain nimble with best-in-class RFID solutions worldwide.

Our solution:

Tracks and monitors equipment and inventory: Monitor the movement of RFID-tagged items with the use of scanners to maximize equipment utility and to signal inventory replenishment.

Enables compliance for cabin safety equipment: A complete solution for airlines that allows for the tracking and management of all rotatable and time-limited items to adhere to industry standards.

Providing compliance for security sweeps for the air industry: A solution set for locations on aircrafts that require security sweeps to ensure tamper-proof environments.

Headquartered in Atlanta, Delta operates significant hubs and key markets in Amsterdam, Atlanta, Bogota, Boston, Detroit, Lima, London-Heathrow, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Minneapolis-St. Paul, New York-JFK and LaGuardia, Paris-Charles de Gaulle, Salt Lake City, Santiago (Chile), Sao Paulo, Seattle, Seoul-Incheon and Tokyo.

As the leading global airline, Delta's mission to connect the world creates opportunities, fosters understanding and expands horizons by connecting people and communities to each other and to their own potential.

Learn more at www.delta.com