How TBX Helps Repair Stations Meet AS9110 Standards

Mike Vincent is a 9110C Manager who works with numerous aviation repair stations on AS9100 standards. Among the organizations he audits is a TBX customer—a Part 145 repair station that holds AS9110 certification. He has been through roughly eight AS9110 audits with this station alone.

The Challenge

For repair stations, AS9110 certification is about more than passing an audit. It's a quality management standard built around traceability: knowing exactly what was done to an aircraft, which parts went on it, where those parts came from, and who signed off on the work.

When Vincent began working with the Part 145 station, its traceability lived almost entirely on paper. "This company was kind of stuck in the past. They did everything on paper," Vincent says. "The maintenance team was doing the work through paper work orders, and when it came over to the parts and invoicing side, everything was written down. That was the source document."

The paper-based process created daily friction. There was no way for a mechanic to request a part without physically walking over to the parts section. The organization also ran a separate parts store, but on paper the two operations were hard to tell apart during AS9110 audits.

Record retention added to the burden. "It used to be very strict," Vincent says. "You've got to keep five years of these records."

In Vincent's experience, paper-based shops tend to run into the same compliance problems again and again. "Usually you're going to see work order problems: work orders opened and closed incorrectly," he says. "Or part numbers that were ordered that weren't the right ones for the aircraft. Now you've spent that time going back through it."

"When I started looking at TBX, I thought, this thing's perfect."

The Solution

As Vincent helped the station evaluate digital platforms, TBX came across his desk. "When I started looking at TBX, I thought, this thing's perfect," he says.

TBX gave the repair station a single system to replace its paper trail. Mechanics can now request parts directly in TBX, and the parts manager can approve and order them from the same place. When the job is done, everything moves straight through to invoicing, which Vincent notes is a key part of what AS9110 auditors review, including how work is invoiced and under what terms and conditions.

The team also loaded its inventory into TBX, solving another long-standing problem. Like any change, adoption took some effort at first. "It was kind of clunky for us at first," Vincent says. "Then we started pushing things through and asking TBX for requests. Can we do this with inventory? Can we do this with that?"

A common question from repair stations considering a move away from paper is whether the certifying body will accept electronic records. Before fully relying on TBX for compliance documentation, Vincent wanted to be sure the platform would meet the external auditor’s expectations, so during the repair station’s most recent audit he asked directly. “I asked him, can I use this?” Vincent recalls. “He was all about it. He said the new initiative is to not be paper-based.” In fact, the auditor stated that, as part of the green initiative and paper reduction, electronic record keeping and tracking is encouraged.

"TBX took all the burden of actually keeping these paper documents."

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The Result

With TBX in place, the repair station no longer has to manage the time-consuming process of maintaining paper records. "It took all the burden of actually keeping these paper documents," Vincent says.

More importantly, TBX strengthens the traceability at the heart of AS9110. Every work order that is opened, worked and closed in TBX builds a record of who touched the aircraft and what they did. "If I have a mechanic touch it and then I have an IA look at it, you've left basically a crumb trail of everyone that's touched that aircraft," Vincent says. "That's where the traceability comes in."

That record pays off when something goes wrong. If an issue comes up on an aircraft, the team can pull the record and identify the part and the work involved, saving man-hours that would otherwise go to digging through paper. "It also gives you a legacy of what that cradle-to-grave looks like for that aircraft," Vincent says.

Because Vincent audits many repair stations, he sees how common these paper-based problems are, and he sees TBX as a natural fit for shops working toward or maintaining certification. Many Part 145 repair stations aren't required to hold AS9110, but for those that are, he says, "TBX can fill both roles."

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