Integrated Approach to Capability Enhancement and Maintenance: a Proposed Framework
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Annual Conference of the Prognostics and Health Management Society, 2009 Integrated Approach to Capability Enhancement and Maintenance: A Proposed Framework Emma Kelly1, Svetan Ratchev1 1 Precision Manufacturing Centre, Manufacturing Division, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK [email protected] Svetan. [email protected] ABSTRACT pace of technology insertion and capability enhancement. This can be achieved through taking into In the current climate, the defence sector is consideration advances in both the defence and civil increasingly characterised by longer product sectors, thus allowing a response to both ‘evolution and life cycles and asset availability demands. revolution in capability’. There is a requirement for There is likely to be a reduction in the number open architectures which permit the incremental of defence acquisition projects in the future. insertion of technology in a ‘plug and play’ manner. In This, combined with military organisational order to enable this, platforms and systems need to be changes and the fact that governments are designed with upgrade and adaptability in mind. New steering towards contracting for capability, has roles for existing systems are also defined in response led to an internal shift in manufacturing to changing threats. Targeting those systems that need centric companies. These traditional to be modular in nature, requires specific identification companies are now providing service support of technologies which evolve rapidly. Alongside for their products, thereby offering reduced capability enhancement is the need to reliably predict risk to the customer. The service support system status. Prognostics is key to aiding both aspect includes the use of new technologies operational and support planning. Effective and methods for managing technical products maintenance planning allows for improved fleet over their life cycle and ensuring that the management and reduced support costs. This sets the customers’ required capability and availability scene for the development of an integrated approach to demands are met. This imposes new capability enhancement and maintenance challenges on subsequent maintenance, repair The reasoning behind the integrated approach stems and capability enhancement procedures. This from the fact that both topics are based on the same paper proposes a framework for the fundamental comparison of capabilities. At a basic development of a Maintenance Dashboard. level, in the case of preventive maintenance, the The underlying purpose being to establish an performance of a capability enabling system fluctuates approach that supports the decision making between design operating and actual values. When process on whether to maintain, repair, considering capability enhancement, the current system upgrade or update a given platform system. capabilities are compared with future and/or desired The Maintenance Dashboard proposal is capabilities. In this manner, it is possible to determine aimed at extending the ‘useful phase’ of a whether a system requires maintaining, repairing or product’s life.† upgrading. Intrinsic to the upgrade decision is the consideration of obsolescence management. Preventive maintenance and capability enhancement are thus two 1 INTRODUCTION aspects within the lifecycle of a system which can be The time between major platform procurements is addressed in an integrated approach. These aspects are increasing and thus there is a need to ‘ramp up’ the considered to embody the decision making process behind the proposed future framework. † This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of The majority of defence customers face continuing the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License, budget pressure and as a consequence they are which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction implementing service methods which are better value in any medium, provided the original author and source are for money whilst maintaining equipment availability credited. levels. There is likely to be a reduction in the number 1 Annual Conference of the Prognostics and Health Management Society, 2009 of defence acquisition projects in the future. This, 2 BACKGROUND combined with organisational changes in the military, has led to an internal shift within defence companies 2.1 Capability from a manufacturing centric organisation to a service ‘We have now reached a crossroads. We are seeing a centric organisation concerned with establishing a shift away from platform oriented programmes towards service based capability. Focus is required on Enabling a capability-based approach, with corresponding Through Life Capability and a systems engineering implications for the demand required of the traditional approach. The organisational changes in the military defence base’, A1.4 (MoD, 2005). have ultimately led to the platform manufacturer The term capability is commonly used in a variety managing the risk. As such, emphasis has been of contexts, and thus it is necessary to define the term refocused towards minimising the cost of ownership in relation to the context in which it is referenced. The whilst maintaining high levels of operability and UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) Acquisition Operating functionality. Framework (MoD, 2009) describes Capability as the The systems engineering approach highlighted in ‘enduring ability to generate a desired outcome or the Defence Industrial Strategy (MoD, 2005) can be effect, and is relative to the threat, physical adapted to illustrate the approach from a support environment and contributions of coalition partners’. services perspective (Figure 1). The top tier represents Capability, in this sense, is delivered by a Force the customer, companies such as BAE Systems often Element for a particular operation or mission and is perform the mid-tier integrator roles and, in assumed to comprise a number of components. conjunction with lower tier partners, produce a support Capability can be defined on a number of levels service solution. Systems engineering provides an inter- ranging from high level military operational disciplinary approach to problem solving. The end aim capabilities to low level capabilities of providing cool is to create a support service structure which satisfies airflow, for example. the defined customer requirements whilst remaining Capability is not a particular system or equipment within cost and schedule constraints. and is formed from various components. These components can be split according to whether capability is assumed from either a military or industrial perspective for example. In delivering a capability however, there are interactions between the individual components; e.g. an industrial product is likely to feed into military equipment. For the purposes of future discussion, capability is considered from a platform/system perspective, ‘the ability of a platform or system to deliver a specific requirement in support of an overall goal’. 2.2 Capability Management Capability enhancement through the insertion of technology, either for the purposes of upgrade or Figure 1. System Service ‘V’ Diagram update (discussed in Section 3.1), falls within capability management. This involves developing a clear This paper proposes a framework for developing a definition of the capability requirements (MoD, 2009). Maintenance Dashboard that embodies an integrated Capability enhancement occurs in response to an approach towards capability enhancement and influencer. An influencer may be either an internal or maintenance. The aim is to establish an approach which external factor which must be taken into account if a supports the decision making process on whether to given platform or system is to deliver the effect maintain, repair, upgrade or update a system. A brief required. Influencers are generally considered at a description of the facets considered in developing the strategic level and may comprise threats, opportunities, integrated approach are detailed in Section 2. The environmental factors and/or internal policy changes. A concepts behind the Maintenance Dashboard and its further notable relationship occurs between capability relevance within the service engineering field are management and technology management. Technology documented in Sections 3 and 4. Future Work and management (Shanks, 2008) is key to the successful Conclusions are covered in Sections 5 and 6. implementation of capability management since it involves developing an awareness of available and 2 Annual Conference of the Prognostics and Health Management Society, 2009 upcoming technologies, and can thus inform the eliciting of capability requirements is vital to the decision making process of the critical technologies successful implementation of a maintenance and available to meet a noted capability requirement. capability enhancement decision process. RE has Specific areas which should be addressed in order to developed into a key stage in the overall systems implement an effective capability-based planning engineering process (Stevens et al., 1998). It is approach cover: concerned with interpreting and understanding user • Requirements management. requirements and their successful transformation and • Integration on two levels; technologies into implementation. Parallels may be drawn between systems and systems into platforms. Section 2.2 and research conducted under the KARE • Robust decision processes for determining project (Ratchev