SMART GUY: Sharul designed a solution that saved MAS big bucks.
A Malaysian Airline System Bhd employee spent many a night burning the midnight oil to design a database solution that rivals commercial systems. And in doing so, Sharul Isahak said he saved the high-flying company RM70mil. MAS has almost 90 aeroplanes, each with millions of spare parts, which makes managing the maintenance of the planes an unenviable task. Engineers had to rummage through stacks of files from many different departments to retrieve maintenance reports before a plane could be serviced. A more efficient solution was urgently needed to track parts and keep record of the maintenance works. That is what spurred Sharul, who has worked as an engineer for MAS for 15 years, to create E-Promis (Engineering Project Management System) for managing aircraft maintenance. It took Sharul, 35, and his colleagues — production planning and control executive foreman Azlie Saufi, 32; system and standard superintendent Mohd Rodzuan, 42; and licensed aircraft engineer Ding Daw Swee, 37 — nine months to perfect E-Promis. Mohd Rodzuan was in charge of making sure that E-Promis complied with the company policy and aviation authority requirements while Ding and Azlie were in charge of getting feedback from 5,000 MAS engineers.
Going digital
Before this there was a big pile of paperwork tracking maintenance work but all that changed with E-Promis. “Formerly we had five separate paper filing systems. Now it’s all digital, and for us it means 50% less manual work,” he said. “It was very difficult to search for data at the time because most of it was on paper and the details were handwritten. This translated to a waste of effort and time,” he said.
THE TEAM: (l-r) Azlie, Mohd Rodzuan, Ding and Sharul took nine months to perfect E-Promis.
“At any one time there will be 20 planes being serviced, and we are now able to provide instant updates for each plane. Also, every task is documented,” he said. E-Promis archives all the maintenance work carried out and allows users to track each step of the process from start to finish, he said. “It helps manage aircraft maintenance in terms of planning, execution and analysis. Routine maintenance has to be done on a plane every five to 10 years,” said Shahrul. “E-Promis also tracks the planned man hours as well as actual man hours spent on each task,” he said. This is crucial for billing other airlines that service their planes with MAS because maintaining a plane is a very complex process, he said. Currently, airlines such as AirAsia and Jetstar service their planes with MAS.
Alternative solution
Designing E-Promis was not a simple affair because Sharul had to look for the cheapest means possible to create the software. “This meant looking at open-source solutions. Instead of platforms such as Microsoft or Sun, we chose LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP),” he said. Plus, E-Promis is a web-based system, which makes it easily accessible from any terminal. Sharul is the sole programmer and architect of the software but what is even more impressive is that he had zero knowledge of programming. “I started from scratch. It took me countless hours doing research on programming. I really pushed myself to the limit," he said. “I have a diploma in IT. But that wasn’t enough for what was required to develop E-Promis. And I learnt from the biggest library there is — the Internet.” But not coming from a programming background has its advantages, according to Sharul. “A lot of programmers are very creative and feature-oriented. They tend to put in a lot of features but forget the most important ingredient — human interaction,” he said. “This results in systems that are too hard to use and too complex.” Also, the system was perfected through a lot of trial and error work but at the end of the day, it was worth it, he said.
Looking back, he said he remembers that one of his lecturers who taught Information Systems at APIIT (Asia Pacific Institute of Information Technology) telling him that he would make a good programmer. “He mentioned that to become a good programmer, one must have problem-solving skills and only now, I realise that he was correct. “Programming needs a lot of effort, passion, creativity, focus and most of all, the will to develop something with purpose,” he said. It was a round the clock effort for Sharul, as he was the sole programmer of the project. “I had to slot in programming work in between my daily tasks. If I didn’t find enough time to do it at work, I would continue it at home and that was a big challenge,” he said. And he is not going to rest on its laurels, as E-Promis is just the beginning. “E-Promis is only one component that we are working on now. The major goal here is to have an enterprise system that handles more things and integrates data across the organisation.” “The goal is to have the system ready in one year.” It looks like that there will be even more days of burning the midnight oil for Sharul and his team.
The Star
5th August 2008
