Middle East Technology Excellence Awards recognizes (Saudi Air Navigation Services) SANS as the winner in ICT - Aviation Technology category

SANS was lauded for its Advanced Maintenance Control Center (MCC) on its air navigational systems.

This year’s Middle East Technology Excellence Awards announced that Saudi Air Navigation Services (SANS) bested other organizations in the Middle East in Information Communication Technology (ICT) for the field of Aviation navigation. SANS was recognized based on its Advanced Maintenance Control Center (MCC) for its air navigational systems. The win emphasizes the ability of SANS to ensure efficient air navigation with customer safety at its core. 

The annual Middle East Technology Awards recognizes technological advancements within the region, mainly in companies that champion and pioneer ground-breaking solutions in cyberspace and Information Technology. Civil aviation is a critical part of the Kingdom’s economic impact globally, making its technological advancement globally renowned. SANS invested millions in upgrading its Air Navigation infrastructure. The Maintenance Control Center (MCC) is an oversite control center monitoring around a thousand pieces of equipment in its more than 56 sites across the Kingdom. 
 
Before implementing this new technology, SANS sites must be visited by its technical teams located in remote areas of the Kingdom if there’s an outage or a fault in infrastructure. Not only that, but these areas are far off civilization and within harsh climates making the visits to each site costly and time-consuming. They also had no idea what they would arrive at regarding the impact in the air traffic operations. 
 
With Maintenance Control Center (MCC), remote monitoring was made possible, and a Maintenance Management System was curated to adhere to the new protocols needed to optimize MCC’s efficiency. The control center is also modular, wherein each module is aimed to optimize the process following the best practices historically and as they go along, continue to develop a better set of protocols within the module. To date, 12 modules have been created, and more than 30 versions have been published. 
 
The system is not only continuously improving itself but is also sensitive to external threats. The infrastructure is built to protect itself from cybersecurity threats and is monitored separately from the operator network. Firewalls are in place for added security. 
 
According to the CEO of SANS, Abdulaziz Al-Zaid, “The Advanced Maintenance Control Center for Air Navigation Systems is a huge milestone in SANS transformation towards achieving its vision to become a regional ANSP leader by providing world-class services.” The homegrown infrastructure was possible due to the company’s multi-skilled team of software developers, engineers, and analysts.

To date, the main modules of Maintenance Control Center (MCC) are as follows: master data management, preventative maintenance management, corrective maintenance management, automatic reporting service, spare parts management, training and certification management, flight inspection management, live service and system availability, calculation of service availability based on the systems dependences (+2700 rule), radar coverage simulation tools, remote monitoring and control, central workshop repair management, and different kinds of management dashboards.

Indeed, the system was made by SANS to also benefit their clients, stakeholders, and partners in the aviation sector. SANS CTO Khalid Attiah stated his enthusiasm, saying how “proud of this achievement [he is] but feel prouder about the fact that this achievement was accomplished by SANS own technical team!”