Paperless aircraft inspection - Product Information

Communications News, May, 2000 by Sean Kelly

Puma Technology helped an aircraft-manufacturing plant do away with an outmoded pen-and-paper system for collecting surveillance information on military planes with Satellite Forms software on handheld computers. Inspectors at Boeing's St. Louis plant had previously used a paper-based system, to track how well military jet production followed planning, engineering drawings, and specifications, and to determine whether there were anomalies in the process. This time-consuming process made it difficult to ensure that the most recent information was recorded.

Satellite Forms software runs on the Palm Computing platform device carried by inspectors, allowing them to collect and enter data into a backend system in real time. The handheld device displays an electronic version of a formerly preprinted document. "This new data collection has unprecedented advantages over our previous pen-and-paper approach and has made the lives of Boeing inspectors and managers much easier," says Mike Heffernan, manager of assembly inspection at Boeing in St. Louis. "We are now able to capture data quickly with improved accuracy since Satellite Forms is enabling us to download our surveillances directly to the database, thus eliminating the need for additional data input."

Satellite Forms integrates handheld devices with data from Oracle, DB2, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Access, and other databases. Applications developed via Satellite Forms are fully extendable, making them capable of meeting new application requirements and achieving tight integration with desktop and server database applications.

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