Maintenance Hub Concepts

This article will explain the different concepts and how to best utilize each within Maintenance Hub.

Work Orders

Work orders serve as the highest level concept and act as the grouper for all of the work to be done. Generally, a work order encompasses a maintenance event, and usually starts when an aircraft is taken in for maintenance, and ends when the aircraft is returned to service. This is not a hard rule, however, as you can create work orders in advance for planning purposes, and the system allows for more than one work order to exist at a time for any given aircraft.

In addition to housing all the work items to be completed during the maintenance event, a work order also serves as the bridge between the aircraft, maintenance reservation, and logbook entries. Work orders can also be aircraft agnostic, should you want to leverage a work order for general shop work that is unrelated to any aircraft.

Work Items

Work items represent a discrete unit of work to be completed. Generally speaking, a work item should encompass all the work to complete a given task, such as an AD, squawk, inspection, etc. For example, it would be best to create a single work item for an entire 100 hr inspection so that you can track over time how long an aircraft is in maintenance each time a 100 hr becomes due. This will help with scheduling, but also give you reporting and analytics to isolate problems if a given aircraft is taking longer in maintenance than other similar makes/models.

Maintenance Hub supports a standard set of types, which will be used to generate reports and also predictive maintenance. You can customize the types further if desired. Work items will also enable parts tracking and labor time tracking in the future. 

You can assign one-to-many mechanics to a work item. Based on your permissions, this will allow the mechanic to take actions on the work item, such as editing, deleting, or assigning other users.

Work items keep a running history of all changes that have been made in the system, and you can also attach documents or images to work items.

Work items also serve as the container for work logs, described below.

Work Logs

Work logs serve as the means to document the maintenance performed to complete a give work item. You can create as many work logs on a work item as needed, but each work log can only be assigned to a single logbook type. Each individual mechanic can document their own work logs, or provided they have the proper permissions, edit and contribute to shared work logs. The person who initially creates the work log will be treated as the originating author, while anyone else would need to have "Edit All Work Logs & Notes" to also be able to edit.

Work logs also serve as a source for your logbook entries.

Logbook Entries

Logbook entries are part of the work order documentation, and can be generated from work logs, or created ad hoc. Regardless of how they are created, logbook entries exist as their own concept in the system. Thus even when generated, they represent the content from the work log sat the time of logbook entry creation. If a mechanic further edits a work log, those changes will not be updated in the logbook entry unless a new logbook entry is generated, or the updated text is copy and pasted. As such, it's best to wait to generate logbook entries until all the work is completed, at least for a given logbook type. 

You can append signatories to your logbook entries, which will include the mechanic name, certificate, date, and signature. Finally logbook entries can be printed.