Singapore Aero Engine Services Private Limited (SAESL) is a global leader in the maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) of Rolls-Royce Trent jet engines. The company provides services for about 20% of the global Trent engine market, operates almost 24x7x365, and supports 5-star airline customers like Singapore Airlines.

SAESL’s technicians take apart, fix and put back together very large jet engines every day to keep airplanes flying around 30,000 feet with roughly 400 people for 10–13 hours at a time explained SAESL’s Chief Executive Officer, Simon Middlebrough. “The stakes are high, so our customers really want two things out of our business: first and foremost is an unimpeachable commitment to quality and safety. Secondly, they buy the effective availability of engines to fly their aircraft.”

To meet rising demand for air travel and an increased need for engine availability, SAESL is accelerating plans to increase its capacity by 40% over the next 5 years, building new facilities and hiring 500 employees. This ambitious vision will be enabled, in part, by an equally ambitious IT modernization initiative designed to support growth while sustaining uninterrupted service to customers.  

The importance of business continuity cannot be emphasized enough when passenger safety is at the heart of everything you do. The MRO process is intricate and inherently complex.

“Every engine has 18,000 components that retains its own data and digital signature,” said Sharael Taha, VP of Strategy and Digital Transformation at SAESL. “Add the different product types that we're running in our shop and the many variants in the products we service, along with engine performance data, where it's been traveling, and what temperature it has been running at — then multiply that by 400 engines a year. It’s a lot of data to process.”

The ability to process that data and share outcomes across engineers and technicians is critical to efficiently delivering high-performance outcomes for customer’s engines. One of the biggest challenges SAESL faces is the hundreds of sequential decisions that require engineers to determine what to do with engine components: replace them, repair them or ask Rolls-Royce for technical intervention. Simon describes it as a logistics dance that requires really good information at the right points along the process to enable teams to make the right decisions for these highly complex engines.

Charting a course for growth and innovation

“Nothing uncovers problems like growth,” attested Simon. “If we operate with the same business and IT systems we've had for the last 20 years, it just won’t work.”

SAESL aimed to scale rapidly and efficiently, making greater use of digital technology to improve productivity, contain costs and enhance operations. This transformation would enable the company to more efficiently serve its customers and equip employees with better tools, processes and workflows.

To succeed, SAESL needed a roadmap to harness its exponential data growth, while modernizing aging systems and strengthening its security posture before tackling other aspirations like cloud migration, Internet of Things and AI.

Navigating the turbulence of change

As SAESL’s leadership explored new possibilities and began charting its transformation roadmap, fresh challenges emerged. With digital technologies becoming embedded in daily operations, there was a need to modernize both the infrastructure and the supporting delivery service.

Simon described SAESL’s need for technology modernization: “We are not IT experts by any stretch of the imagination and we had a legacy system that was probably designed 20 years ago. We very quickly realized we needed to partner with someone who had genuine, leading-edge expertise and a very broad view of what the art of the possible was, to help us build the foundation to leverage for our growth.”

Leadership was quick to re-prioritize: seeking to address employees’ equipment and service needs first, followed by more strategic concerns, like creating a data strategy, bolstering its infrastructure systems and enhancing its security posture.

Clear skies ahead for employee experience, security and data strategy

Together, SAESL and Kyndryl set out to modernize the company’s entire IT environment.

Employee Experience Transformation: The team started with an overhaul of SAESL’s service desk using SymphonyAI’s ITSM tool, which offered employees multiple ways to interact through call, text, email, chat and FAQs solutions. Kyndryl migrated the employee Active Directory accounts to Microsoft Azure for streamlined management. Employees noticed the convenience immediately, resulting in a better overall experience.

To address the broader challenges, Kyndryl Consult hosted a Kyndryl Vital co-creation workshop that brought together SAESL management, engineers, technicians and other teams into a collaborative, problem-solving approach.

“Kyndryl worked really well with us, being clear on where we were in our current state as an organization and providing a very clear set of iterative options that would lay the foundation for our future growth. We partnered with Kyndryl because we saw an equal focus on collaboration to help us navigate the journey together,” said Simon.

Networking: Kyndryl implemented an Operation Technology wireless network and upgraded server technology to help SAESL enhance operational efficiency by connecting various machines, sensors and devices used in the MRO process and enabling real-time data collection, analysis and optimization.

Security: Kyndryl initiated a thorough cyber risk assessment and gap analysis to then develop a security operations center (SOC) with a virtual CISO system and a thorough strategy aligned with SAESL’s business goals.

“From a cybersecurity perspective, it was good to understand where the challenges were, where the exposures were, and then use that to carve out our strategic cybersecurity roadmap,” said Sharael.

Kyndryl implemented a comprehensive security strategy with measures that included firewall, antivirus, encryption, authentication and authorization, and backup and recovery solutions. SAESL adopted a proactive and preventive approach to security, conducting regular security audits and tests, such as vulnerability scans and penetration tests.

The SOC uses Microsoft Sentinel which is a cloud-native security information and event management (SIEM) and security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) solution that provides comprehensive security analytics and threat detection across the enterprise. The SOC monitors the environment 24/7 and provides containment, eradication and recovery for cyber incidents, as well as reporting, analysis and lessons learned.

 An overarching change was the shift in SAESL’s culture to security awareness and education, fostering a sense of shared responsibility and accountability for security through regular phishing email exercises and cybersecurity trainings.

AI and Analytics: Pivotal in monitoring SAESL’s systems performance and application visibility is the introduction of Kyndryl Bridge AIOps, which uses artificial intelligence and automation to monitor, analyze and optimize the availability of IT infrastructure and applications. Now, Kyndryl’s technical teams can identify issues quickly and resolve them before they result in server or network outages. This visibility enables the team to have a complete view of the IT environment and address issues at the root, proactively distributing fixes via Red Hat Ansible playbooks.

Data Strategy, Classification and Governance: Given SAESL’s growth trajectory and the explosion of structured and unstructured data managed at every step of the MRO process — such as visual inspection videos, pictures, PDFs and more — Kyndryl performed a Data Strategy Assessment to better understand the baseline. Using the results as a guide, Kyndryl then helped transform SAESL’s data lake and data warehouse, and instituted clear data governance for identifying, tagging and storing data.

Sharael described that, “In the past, everyone would hold their own Excel spreadsheet. Everyone would have their own repository. They would have their own lead time and rely on their own intuition. From an employee’s perspective, it was getting to the point that it was untenable.”

With specific data governance in place, access to important information as an engine is repaired can be shared among colleagues for a safer, more efficient environment.  Not only that, but the storage costs previously incurred were creating technical debt. The new system with a single source of truth for data identification and governance around storage tagging has created an efficient environment.

Access to real-time data has had a positive impact on the business. It allows technicians to better predict tasks and lead times, engineers to manage inspections, operational teams to affect engine prioritization and for procurement to more efficiently manage parts needed.

“What we've created in the past three years, where we've classified and structured all the data in such a way that there is one single source of truth, and being able to tap into this data to run the analytics on it so the engineering team or the technicians or the operations team are all looking at the same data to come up with the best optimized solution for the organization is extremely important,” emphasized Sharael.

The resulting efficiency gains have allowed SAESL to deliver engines back to customers faster and instill confidence that the company can continue to deliver while growing to meet demands.

Simon reflected on the SAESL’s purpose and transformation, “What we do has an incredibly powerful purpose because much of what goes on in the world is underpinned by people and goods being moved. Things will change, technology will change, but what I am confident in now is that whenever those changes come, we will be addressing them from a position of strength and resilience.”