RAF Asset Management

Tracking and Managing RAF Support Equipment World Wide

The Royal Air Force (RAF) operates a wide range of aircraft — each with its own support equipment requirements — in locations spread around the globe.

Challenge

As aircraft move from location to location support equipment follows, this makes tracking and managing the equipment increasingly difficult.

With the growing need to reassign equipment to support other operations, frequently at short notice, the RAF found that they needed a system that would enable them to both track and manage the maintenance schedule for its ground support equipment.

Solution

The Ground Equipment Management System (GEMS) was first bought into service in 1995 to support some 6000 major equipment items - ranging from generators to lifting tackle and stores racking.

GEMS tracks the history of all equipment including locations, modifications and maintenance events and reports data back to a central database for global management information and reporting.

Benefits

GEMS has delivered a number of improvements in terms of the RAFs ability to track, maintain and manage the state of its assets:

• Providing a single, centralised system from which to access equipment data
• Provides a global view of the state and location of equipment
• Improved equipment availability through the application of a rigorous maintenance regime

GEMS has also been extended to the Royal Navy, which has deployed the system on board their ships. GEMS has also been adopted by the Army in support of helicopter operations. Ruggedised laptop systems are also available to accompany deployments, thus providing a truly rapid and compact mobile capability.