Services must achieve logistics efficiencies and unit self-sufficiency” through autonomous delivery, 3D printing, and all manner of technical improvements.. In a specific technical example, Marines are  developing “rapid fabrication” kits, which allow soldiers to harness 3D printing to produce parts and tools. In addition, the Services are all sponsoring research to deliver via drone including the Joint Tactical Aerial Resupply Vehicle, 

Modern militaries hope to bypass the long and expensive factory-to-fort to port-to-base to last-tactical-mile to combatant-supply chain and replace it with organic manufacture on the battlefield or manufacture-to-direct need in combat to feed the tremendous consumption of operational demands.

Autonomous Aerial Cargo Utility System AACUS, a Marine system is intended to integrate a point and click system within a degraded visual environment, satellite denied navigation, obstacle avoidance enroute to and in the landing zone, and automated landing site selection for logistics use.

“Our delivery of these forces assures an unparalleled global expeditionary capability and gives our Nation options when needing to respond to a variety of crises. Ultimately, this unmatched capability extends a helping hand or projects combat power anywhere, at any time and provides a key strategic advantage for our Nation.

Speed and capacity have more often than not been a difficult  logistics problem for the military to solve. Too much too soon is just as much a problem as supplier coming late. In order to combat the dangers of too much too soon, logistics strategists must ensure there is a proper network to distribute personnel and materiel to the precise point of need. 

A smart logistics network is critical to the technical capabilities of machine delivery to the fight or direct manufacture by 3D printing. Delivering a unit ammunition it cannot carry, or printing too many spare parts, will only heighten follow-on logistics needs rather than alleviate them. 


Recent tactical struggles with logistics, however, highlight the problems of delivery systems and processes placed into under the stress of combat.  Military sustainment crews sometimes have little combat training and were expected to deliver materiel mostly unimpeded. 

A permissive environment for logistics extends to the network domains as well. The need to create a network of logistics, which can meet combat requirements and provide the necessary command and control, requires a significant reliance on permissive battlespace. Solutions, such as blockchain tech are on the way to provide the open- architecture necessary to interface in the market, while also providing required operational security.

Even in modern context, regardless of technical means of transportation or manufacture, logistics still lives in the physical world. No amount of quick delivery or high-tech 3D printing will alleviate the fact that personnel need food and water, vehicles need fuel, and weapons need ammunition. 

When we think of readiness, some experts confuse it with preparedness terms such as a ‘notice to move’. But it is common to find that despite a unit being well within its designated ‘notice’ when time comes for action, the unit is constrained because of the availability of kit, a lack of enabling elements available in supporting formations, the slow activation of commercial resources by strategic organisations as well as other logistics factors

In some cases, strategic-level decisions result simply because available capabilities cannot be appropriately sustained and, accordingly, are unable to be deployed. Sometimes decisions result in considerable advance moves based on combat forces being available, only to find these forces combat ineffective until the logistics ‘tail’ catches up. 

In some situations, we can see many logistics readiness issues transpire directly onto operational outcomes. Results in logistics are a consequence of a process; a process involving numerous capabilities, agencies and organisations and takes resources made available to the military at the strategic level of war and converts them to combat power at the tactical levels. 

Many factors are essential for logistics readiness, and the early performance of the logistics process at during an operation. Fundamentally, logistics readiness refers to the ability to undertake, to build up and thereafter to sustain, combat operations at the full combat potential of forces. It comprises actions undertaken during operations, but is predominantly a consequence of routines and practices set in organisation behaviour long before deployment. 

It is not a simple matter of issuing logistics units their own ‘notice to move’ or applying some other metric that will inevitably be ‘crashed’ through in a time of crisis; rather logistics readiness is a function of total organisational performance and efficiency. This standard of performance is achieved by addressing factors applicable at all levels – from the strategic to the tactical. 

Balance between logistics and combat resources and elements. There must be an appropriate balance of logistics resources to the combat elements. This is captured in the concept of‘tooth-to-tail’ ratios. But logistics resources can be appropriated by a variety of means and may include commercial operations as well as those in uniform. 

Logistics plans and policies. Logistics plans and policies, from stockholding policies at the unit and formation level right up to national mobilisation plans at the strategic / budget level must be available. Format and bulk of plans are less important than those that are developed through interagency effort, and reflecting the nature of an efficient and effective logistics process.

Logistics organisation. Logistics organisations must be structured to support operational requirements rather than bureaucratic needs. Although organisations may not need to be resourced to their full wartime capability during most periods which they rarely are because to do so would be cost prohibitive. The organisational architecture must be established to enable the transition to an operational footing and policies in place to enable such a transition to occur rapidly.

Materiel readiness. There must be a high state of materiel readiness across the force. In addition to appropriately funding the sustainment of equipment, and the establishment of appropriate stockholdings in appropriate areas to enable operational contingencies, the means of sustaining equipment must be as appropriate for support operations as they are for efficiency in garrison. Failures in materiel readiness in garrison are often replicated in major sustainability issues on operations, and necessitate consequential actions such as cannibalisation to achieve desired operational readiness outcomes.
 
It is difficult to remove any discussion on logistics readiness without referring to the capacity of the logistics ‘tail’. It may seem that it is easier to build up logistics forces, and support organisations, than it is to have combat forces ready.  This is because it is generally easier to procure equipment for logistics purposes than it is for combat forces, there is assumed familiarity between logistics operations and industrial activities which suggests that any conversion between the two is relatively simple, and there is always the possibility that the commercial sector can be turned to overcome any deficiencies there may be in organic logistics capabilities. 

There are  perceptions which tend to ignore the importance of logistics readiness to the overall employability of the force. Even if the ease of raising these logistic capabilities were a simple task, to take it for granted that operational deficiencies can be overcome at short notice is not very smart.

If military forces are to be responsive, fully trained and equipped logistics forces must be available; processes ranging from strategic activity to tactical action must be coherent and well-practiced. A combat force without efficient and effective logistic support is ineffectual and, in the end, a waste of organisational effort.

At the root of logistics readiness is the pairing of acquiring and maintaining military capability to have it available, and the establishment of a logistics process which enables or constrains its use operationally. Capabilities and acquisition process typically executed by Service headquarters, limit the combat forces that can be created and made available. 

But it is logistics capabilities and practices that limit the forces that may be actually employed on military operations. The combat unit that is formed and given the latest technology, best armour and capable of overmatch against any possible adversary will be ineffective – undeployable in practice – without a logistics system capable of sustaining it.  

Logistics readiness is particularly vital for expeditionary military operations. Not only do robust logistics capabilities define the capacity of a military to project force, these same capabilities underwrite the ability of a military to respond quickly, affording them time to overcome the distance there may be to the operational area.

Militaries rarely assign logistics readiness issues as their highest priority to resolve. Instead they are typically consumed with ensuring that the elements at the forward edge of the operational area are as ready as practicable. But if compromises are made as to the  preparedness of the logistics ‘system’ as a whole, or the logistics process is inefficient or ineffective due to poor practices and inadequate logistic discipline across the military, the readiness and preparedness of any unit destined for operations will itself be compromised. 

Operational reporting consistently identifies forces as having culminated as a consequence of system-wide logistics failures that may have been otherwise prevented. Less well known are the times in which senior commanders have had to make choices on which forces they chose not to deploy based on the readiness of the logistics forces and the logistics process more generally. 


When it comes to battlefield logistics, Marines are envisioning a future of warfare that looks very different from its experience over the last decade — one where combat units need to be able to sustain themselves for up to a week without any access to traditional supply lines. The prospect is creating demands for new technologies that let soldiers produce their own water, make many of their own parts, and deliver much of the rest of what they need via drones. Additionally, troops need reliable electric power and high-speed networking capabilities .

We need to get back to basics, where soldiers can win in an austere environment. ”We are operating on the assumption that future ground combat against other capable militaries is more likely to involve smaller units who have basic supplies of fuel, food and water, and not much else, 

Some of those austerity requirements are self-imposed, because the biggest threats to troops could come from advanced enemy forces pinpointing their locations via the electromagnetic signatures generated by their power generation or communications equipment. So those forces will need to be able to operate independently, constantly on the move, with little-or-no-communications.

Marines will need technologies that let them get by for longer periods of time without resupply of fundamental commodities like water. “We’re looking for technology that would be designed to produce or reuse water on-site. We’re looking at air-to-water technology and man-portable water purification,. Right now, our brigade combat teams don’t have the capacity or the capability to distribute 95 percent of their own water requirements or reuse 75 percent of their water requirements. So any emerging technology in this area would be huge to reduce our footprint.”

To cut back on the need for fuel supplies, Marines want to equip units with advanced power technologies — including more efficient equipment that uses less fuel, hydrogen and hybrid technology and microgrids, and portable renewable energy generation capabilities that harness solar and wind power.

Marines will also need the ability to fix their equipment without the expectation that spare parts can be readily flown or trucked in — or having to carry their own — to be able to produce them on-site using additive manufacturing technologies.

No matter how self-sustaining Marine units become, they will need to be resupplied at some point, and supply convoys  are expected to be even more vulnerable to attack in future conflicts than they have been over the last decade So it wants to take as many troops  off of logistics routes as possible and replace them with autonomous vehicles.

“One of the initiatives we have is to look at leader-follower technology, where you have a manned truck in the front and then several unmanned vehicles behind, therefore minimising the amount of manpower you have to have out there. “But we’re also looking at fully-autonomous ground and aerial resupply. 

At the scale of major weapons systems, Marines are doing all it can to make systems maintainable in-theater, rather than having to return them to large depots for repairs or routine upkeep.

To achieve that, the service has begun installing condition monitoring subsystems on its older weapons to collect data on how they’re performing so that units can conduct conditions-based maintenance: fixing individual problems before they cause a breakdown, rather than conducting maintenance only on predetermined schedules.

“This is capturing usage and diagnostic data as well as parametric engineering data like temperature, speed, G-forces through turns, whatever it might be, and then off-ramping that data to the battalion maintenance officer to begin developing corrective action “It can tell us if we have maintenance problems, tech data documentation problems, obsolescence problems or reliability issues.
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And for newer systems, Marines are rethinking the ways in which it ensures its weapons will be as sustainable as possible once they reach the battlefield. In the past, extensive analyses of weapons’ maintainability, reliability and sustainment costs were conducted in the early stages of their development, but hasn’t tended to revisit those questions once a system is fielded. So Marines are working to redesign the way product support strategies required of every major weapons systems are developed.

What do Marines demand in terms of design work and performance? How did the system perform in tests? And how’s it actually proving out in the operational battlespace? That’s proving to be a very powerful oversight mechanism.”

We’re taking a look at the requirements our capability developers outline for us in terms of performance characteristics: What are our supply availability measures? What is the mean time to repair, how maintainable, reliable, available should the system be? 

We’re linking those requirements to what we’re calling an operational sustainment review where we bring weapons systems  back into the building and reviewing all of those integrated product support elements. 

It takes patience to teach Marines how to make sure all their equipment shows up where they can use it.

Deploying aircraft requires focused efforts by all stakeholders to ensure logistics resources are available to support the Fleet introduction to include funding, spares, tools, support equipment, information systems support, and training.

The summit was primarily built to maximise communication, elevate problems, and arrive at solutions. Most aircraft have a unique maintenance and support structure, making it difficult to implement best practices across the fleet.

"The logistics process, capabilities and organisations must be systematically assessed for its readiness. Every military activity or exercise is an opportunity for assessing logistics performance, but it is rare that military exercises comprehensively test and assess operational sustainability and logistics readiness. Fewer still are those exercises that test logistics readiness through a major deployment performed at short-notice; a phase of an operation that demands all supporting agencies are ready."

There must be a high state of materiel readiness across the force. In addition to appropriately funding the sustainment of equipment, and the establishment of appropriate stocks in appropriate areas to enable operational contingencies, the means of sustaining equipment must be as appropriate for support operations as they are for efficiency in garrison. Failures in materiel readiness are often replicated in major sustainability issues on operations, and necessitate consequential actions such as switching parts between aircraft to achieve desired operational readiness outcomes."

Marine Corps leadership utilise unreliable information when making decisions about major end items and spare parts because Information contained in the Marine Corps legacy logistics and supply information systems is significantly inconsistent & inaccurate.

We believe this occurs because Marine Corps guidance does not sufficiently define the respective roles and responsibilities for Marine Corps logistics information systems.

So this results in confusion among personnel in various Marine Corps commands about who is responsible for the accuracy of different elements contained in the systems. Inconsistencies and inaccuracies also occurred, in part, because Marine Corps guidance lacks adequate operating procedures and business rules for legacy logistics information systems. 

Marine Corps personnel in the Fleet are not aware of, or are not in compliance with, current operation procedures and business rules. We found the Marine Corps has insufficient assurance that most important information is transitioning to Global Combat Support Systems.

Logistics Modernisation Programme system was not designed with the functionality to identify receiving and invoice documents stored in another system. So it wasn’t possible to identify the amounts it previously credited for inventory items returned for repair. 

System did not provide sufficient, accurate, and appropriate documentation to support the costs recorded for sampled inventory transactions in capital working fund.
Result comes from ineffectively performed discovery and corrective action phase activities of the fiscal operating space related to capital fund inventory business processes.

Class deviations requires  contracting personnel to make determinations of good supply schedule order deals for equipment and fixed services. A deviation is the issuance or use of a policy, procedure, solicitation provision, written contract section, method, or practice of conducting logistics actions of any kind at any stage of the process inconsistent with Logistics Rules. A class deviation is a change from guidance that affects more than one contract action.

Specifically, the System did not: 1) detail standard logistics operating procedures, flowcharts, and narratives describing inventory business processes; 2) identify the key logistics positions that needed to be contacted to identify, maintain, and provide key supporting documentation for the transactions associated with inventory processes; and 3) create corrective action plans to remediate known documentation deficiencies

A new enhanced Logistics data analytics tool is helping Marines keep its aircraft in the air with greater consistency, giving analysts insight into key readiness data. The tool aims to bring a predictive capacity to aviation readiness, giving planners a view into potential problems before they arise. 

We can drill down and very quickly say, 'There’s your problem right there!' whereas before I had to take one spreadsheet and match it to another spreadsheet, and meld them together. That could take up a lot of time depending on how big the problem actually was.. 

Readiness has been an issue for Marines in recent years. The ability to fly when and as needed “is in a precarious position since it has been subject  to a decade of high-tempo work overstressing the systems needed to keep aircraft in flying shape. At the same time, Marines has been “challenged to recover full productivity due to budget cuts.
The net result is that planes spend too long on the ground. The answer from the Logistics and Maintenance Analysis Division is better data management.  Previously, vital information on aircraft status, parts and workflow has often been inaccessible.  

“An analyst would go into a database, pull the data, clean it up, and then the data would lead them to something else where they would have to go to another database and do the same thing over and over.“
The new logisitcs system is aiming to smooth things out. “The point was to do some analytics to find out what the root causes were, what the correlations where that might be causing the airplanes to be down,” “But the system was being used in a very limited way, and we saw bigger possibilities in it.” 

To build a smoother data analytics mechanism, developers had to overcome territorial hurdles, connected databases from many outside sources.  “We didn’t own all those databases and very often the owners of those other databases don’t want people mucking around in their data. They have firewalls and things like that they didn’t want us to penetrate. “So we had to do a lot of work just to get access to these databases, to demonstrate that we weren’t going to break it.” 
The tool now cuts across multiple databases to give a more comprehensive view than was previously available. The tool pulls together all the data from all those sources and presents it in a manner that can be easily reviewed. Instead of looking at a spreadsheet you get a graph: Here’s how many airplanes are down. Here are the list of components they are down for.” 

Users can drill down into the data to correlate present shortages against historical trends. “In the total population of aircrafts, how many were down for this reason? The tools will tell you what components in those systems were holding those airplanes down. It will tell you what the parts and the subcomponents and the status.

This in turn gives planners an opportunity to become proactive. Deeper analytics make it possible to watch the entire inventory of aircraft for places where problems are likely to arise and to take preemptive active. 

The tool starts to move us into proactive, projected space. It will set a baseline for a system, component or subcomponent using the latest several years worth of data on failures across those systems: Here’s how often it fails. If you move away from that baseline it will give you a heat map, a yellow light that shows you are failing more often than expected.

“The more often the system fails, the more warnings you will get. If we are proactive as soon as we see those initial warnings, we can take action before the supply system runs out of parts and before the maintenance system gets backlogged. “We can get ahead of the problem.” 

“It has let us make the right decisions on divesting our inventory. We’re still providing the right parts where soldiers need them. Some of that was linking together what had been our legacy systems to get a clear picture of what our inventory posture is on any given day, but we also have a view into our contracting processes so that we can see when new procurements are going to be delivered, when the items that are out for repair are going to come back, when all of the items that are in transit are going to be delivered to our customers. 

“We’re now taking these capabilities to streamline and automate our business processes down to the shop floor.  “They’re using the tool in support of detailed production activities, and we’re now managing millions of transactions a day.”

Much of that work is happening via the recent deployment of mobile devices distributed to workers at depots where WiFi infrastructure, tablets and barcode scanners are beeing deployed to replace the mountains of paper that used to be necessary to specify and then document each turn of a screw on a helicopter, a truck or a tank.

“Before, if you were at one location taking apart a helicopter for an overhaul, that was all done manually: the engine goes through various work centers, the rotor blades go somewhere else, and a lot of people touch those components and use a lot of new parts before it comes back together into the helicopter at the end.

You can imagine the stack of paper as that process goes on. We’ve eliminated that with automated technologies so that all the labour, the parts consumed, the financials that link to all of that are all inside the tool, and you only have a couple pieces of paper moving around with barcodes that link back to all this information.”

“Now, we’re moving beyond infrastructure as a service and embracing platform tools as a service, adopting new capabilities to further enhance readiness. We cannot conduct tomorrow's operations using yesterday's processes and procedures. 

We need to understand the leading indicators to readiness, and getting in front of the  logistics challenges so we are marching forward to the technology of the future.

1. Create methods describing whole life cycle of a virtual production enterprise, including the design transactions among potential partners as part of the strategic activity.

2. Establish set of Reference Models to allow the representation of virtual production relationships to include design system teams, the operational business process and external constraints

3. Stand up performance measurement systems to help in assessment, decision-making and control of the production virtual organisation.

4. Utilise network engineering tools to solve specialised problems of the production business.

5. Employ Information Infrastructure model to support all the Virtual production Enterprise activities.

6. Build existing complementary approaches in only one architecture.

7. Improve result architecture incorporating new techniques, methods, models and templates. 

8. Validate usability and application, carry out real enterprise integration projects, mostly in sectors with small and medium-sized enterprises 

9. Organise knowledge and experience obtained in primary architecture 

10. Develop particular architectures and specialised tools focus on necessities of every enterprise activity type

One of the main underlying trends in Training development is the focus on agent models, protocols, and mechanisms to support the collaboration of pre-existing entities in distributed real-world scenarios, be it among organisations, among Troops, or among Troops and organisations.

Site Visit Executive must continually assess approaches to systems training/engineering, including use of agent models, simulation results, artificial intelligence techniques, and tools supporting training process so it is possible to stay ahead of demands for new and upgraded weapons systems. 

Using agent models is not a new concept; however, digital engineering will address long-standing challenges associated with complexity, uncertainty, and rapid change in deploying defense systems. By providing for more agile and responsive development, digital training/engineering supports engineering excellence and provides a foundation for mission success in the future. 

Realising end-to-end digital enterprises, automating tasks and processes, and making smarter, faster decisions all require next frontier of technologies to transform the way agents and machines interact. Advances in artificial intelligence have given rise to behavioural technologies capable of performing tasks that traditionally required intelligence of commanders in the field. 

Covering all requirements of modern military logistics enterprise simulations is not easy problem. We propose two agent-based technologies for logistics support on two different levels: intra-enterprise and extra-enterprise level-- can be used simultaneously or together. 

The standard configuration consists of several independent systems linked to the virtual organisation by agent-based decision support technology in various fields of logistics – maintenance planning, supply chain decision-making models, simulation, extra-enterprise access, etc. 

Although established architectures have many good points, all these architectures can be improved, since they have not completely generated the necessary digital modeling techniques and adequate execution tools for the different kinds of enterprise architectures and specialised tools focus on necessities of every type of enterprise activity.

Integration of the Simulation exercise that we have carried out at in different logistics scenarios validated that the agent-based technology is viable in situations where the maintenance planning problem is constantly changing e.g. project driven production, and requires frequent and continuous re-planning. 

In these Readiness Simulations the collective aspects of the agent technology have been exploited. At the same time we have identified a great potential of the technology in situations where the planning problem is characterised by complex processes but it features some of the internal logistics. 

Integration of virtual enterprises must be developed and their use must be populated through examples and application experiences. The objective is to develop and validate a step forward in the state of the art of Digital Architectures for Enterprise Integration. 

 Objective consists of architecture section selection to describe and present all the necessary activities to establish, carry out and complete an enterprise integration programme for any kind of enterprise. 

Requirements and components are put together by digital standards teams. Any kind of proposal for an enterprise integration reference architecture can be evaluated under certification criteria.

In the case of the high volume production/maintenance availabilities, where not only collective aspects of agent simulation technology have been used but also the integrative capabilities of agents have been exploited e.g. integration of the linear programming heavy-duty solver.

In simulations where the planning metrics are widely distributed and not fully available the agent technologies provide an robust integrative and distributed planning framework for supply chain administration and virtual production/maintenance organisations formation. 

Strong reliance on standards will contribute to facilitate the interfacing of existing applications with the virtual infrastructure, but unfortunately not all classes of information that need to be exchanged among virtual agents are covered by existing standards. 

Initiatives of application agent groups contribute to facilitate this process. In general, it is necessary to develop some interface/mapping layer, at each enterprise, to adequately have this enterprise interacting with virtual infrastructure. 

In the case that an enterprise fails to perform its duties, the Virtual Enterprise must be reconfigured to replace the failing enterprise with another one. To support this functionality it is nice to have a distributed digital process plan/model tool to allow for re-planning and re-scheduling of logistics processes.

To support function of Virtual Enterprise-- independent of Virtual Enterprise size there is a need for a Virtual Enterprise coordinator. to monitor distributed logistics process Job Status and comparing it to Virtual Enterprise plans as described in the contracts. 

Application vendors are faced with a challenge when trying to provide Digital Twin performance measurement functionality within their products. Users often wish to include metrics relating to information not residing within the vendor’s application database. This is especially the case when measuring the performance of cross-functional and inter-enterprise processes, which involve drawing information about any functional department within a company, or about customer/supplier activities. 

We offer platforms to help logistics units join on-demand prototype networks and access to suppliers. Our application solution allows print/repair shops to join an on-demand prototype network, adding their capacities to it and enabling them to selling those capacities via their own networked shop..

It is increasingly common for the manufacturer of a complex product to purchase much of the content in the product from other companies. For example, an automotive manufacturer might buy seats from one company, brake systems from another, air conditioning from a third, and electrical systems from a fourth, and manufacture only the chassis, body, and powertrain in its own facilities. 

“We basically connect the different network shops in the background to establish the networks. Our Enterprise solution gives users access to the on-demand prototype suppliers— as well as the ability to compare their internal capacities with those of the companies on the network.

While these are recommended supply chain measures, it is rare for one organisation to control its whole supply chain performance. Supply chains are typically comprised of many value-adding trading partners controlling the portions they interact in . While this might be the case, supply chain tactics principles dictate that significant benefits can accrue when integrated inter-enterprise processes are in place, to link and optimise the supply chain.

Here we describe single Phases of cooperation life-cycle on Enterprise-to-Enterprise level searching of the possible product support collaborators. First, agents have to contact possible partners. There is wide field for future research in the domain of automatic search cooperation and contacting possible partners.

This Blockchain approach ensures the trustworthiness of the partners transferred from real-life to the agents cooperation. Each agent is equipped by the addresses and the security certificates and every partner can be authenticated using standard key methods. Every agent can be connected to many partner agents according to defined internal cooperation rules.

Once the agents are connected together, each agent provides the list of available product support capabilities to partners. It is possible to propose different capabilities to different partners. During this phase agents form basic cooperation network, receiving information suitable for effective collaboration in the next phases. During the life-cycle of the cooperation, agents subscribe information of the changes on product support resources on already established platforms.

Once you have your network in place, you‘re ready to consider our challenge in depth. The transition from producing many parts from a few orders to producing a few parts from many orders isn’t easy, especially when it comes to quoting.

“It’s definitely one of the biggest roadblocks right now. “Even if you’re fast, it usually takes significant block of time to prepare a quotation for an order. There’s also a lot of ‘communication “ping-pong” at the beginning: someone sends a request, you check if the part is printable, it’s not, so you request changes back and forth, and it just goes on like that.”

Fortunately, you can avoid all that communication “ping-pong” by automating your quotations and printability checks. Our Enterprise Platform is designed to do just that. In addition to giving you direct access to our network of print parts suppliers, the platform can also evaluate models for pricing and printability, include side-by-side comparisons of internal 3D printers with those in your on-demand prototypes network

These tools give us complete visibility on manufacturing and service operations, a capability we now have for the first time. These applications also help us improve the accuracy of our work orders; engage in more efficient production scheduling; enable interaction with our diverse vendor supply chain and reduce logistics delays for parts.

We have also noticed most legacy applications were designed for a enterprise-centered local operation and to be operated by agents. In order to have these applications supplying information to or consuming information from the virtual network, it is clearly necessary to extend their functionality. 

Interoperability among enterprise applications represents a major challenge for supporting the rapid formation of virtual scenarios, in response to new operational opportunities. On the other hand it is important to have in mind that each enterprise has its own way of doing business. 

Furthermore the level of information sharing among virtual agents is likely to either change of the trust level among partners or with adjustments to configuration in time. Therefore, flexible virtual coordination and information visibility rights definition mechanisms are required to support both the autonomy and change order properties in behaviour of virtual agents.

Multi-agent solutions exist for low-level scheduling or control systems as well as product-configuration and quote phases to be used for short- and long-term production planning and supply chain administration.

Multi-agent systems on intra-enterprise level and extra-enterprise level are independent in the digital population point of view. Agents used on intra-enterprise level are operating inside an enterprise represents many units or processes in the unit. On extra-enterprise level, whole unit is represented by a single agent, providing all abilities and services, available in the company.

If agents on both levels are used, a special Digital Twin agent can exists that bind both levels together. For digital application purposes, both levels can be modeled together as a Digital Twin to study and improve their abilities.

Multi agent systems can be used also for a digital simulation and modeling of the production process or the supply chain, where they easily simulate an independence of involved parts. These tools can help to answer non-trivial tasks – how changes in single component will affect the production process or supply chain as a whole.


Must focus on optimising maintenance workload tracking across the enterprise and at Sustainment Centre level across all complexes by serving as a single entry point to outside customers with capability to identify workload capabilities and shortfalls across the enterprise and use this information to pursue new/repatriated workload. 

Logistics Complexes operate with some different business processes creating conditions where complex cannot provide standardised guidance. Does not have optimum visibility of capability, capacity, or cost across enterprise. 

An improved, single-interface solution will serve to share backshop and local manufacturing workload solutions among the complexes, reduce costs, accelerate feedback loops, and develop greater local manufacturing agility.
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Must have a robust and agile single-interface solution that provides optimum visibility and improvement opportunities for the Maintenance Repair/Overhaul enterprise based on capabilities and capacities utilising the guidance reflected in the Technology Repair Centre construct. 

There are many programmes, processes and offices working multiple issues related to capacity, manpower workload and so on, but no aggregated metrics to allow assessments at the complex level. Assessments are performed in a variety of efforts throughout the enterprise but they do not use the same methodology. 

Even if complex had good metrics on capability and capacity, the lack of common equipment and tools makes temporary shifts to balance back shop and local manufacturing workload very difficult. 

Well-designed enterprise-level Strategic Sustainment Frameworks are required to provide an overall site picture of current and future workload in areas such as backlog of workloads, surplus capacity, manpower requirements by skills, facilities capabilities, machine capabilities and space requirements. 

Complex is at risk of discarding essential equipment and skill sets without Strategic Sustainment Teams in place to review in-house repair shop capabilities and verify interdependent capabilities are retained before restructures or consolidations. There is no enterprise level strategy in place to review any potential short or long-term workload reassignments. Repatriation efforts are not prioritised based on enterprise wide needs.

Must leverage collaborative innovation of numerous participants across multi-agent enterprise, permitting shared risk, maximised reuse of assets and reduced total ownership costs. 

Combination of open systems architecture and an open multi-agent model permits acquisition of modular and interoperable system, allowing for system elements to be added/modified and replaced over duration of mobile exercises. 

Modular open architecture includes updating key interfaces within the system and relevant design disclosure. Key enabler is adoption of an open multi-agent model requires doing mission status updates in a transparent way.

Smart to allow for system elements removal and/or support by different groups throughout the duration of exercise so afford opportunities for enhanced competition and innovation.

Agents communicate digitally, and currently use point addressing. Messages do not persist outside of agents, and agents do not move over the network. Fixed market protocol is used but also provides for field unit operators behind component agents to communicate directly with one another using Standard work orders.

The initial configuration of component agents and characteristic agents is defined when the system is initialised, but component agents can engage in markets for other characteristics as the system runs. 

The fundamental challenge in applying agents to both planning and control is satisfying a global criterion on the basis of parallel local decisions. In spite of the natural benefit that centralisation has in dealing with control criteria, case studies show that many users have found agents an even better approach. 

Operational systems must be maintained, and it is much easier to maintain a set of well-bounded modules than to make changes to a large programme. The move toward supply chains means that the manufacturing system is geographically distributed, and agent decentralisation reduces communication bottlenecks and permits local parts of the enterprise to continue operation during temporary lapses in connectivity. 

Competitiveness increasingly depends on adjusting system operations frequently to track customer requirements, benefiting from how agent systems can be changed. The ability of agents to deal with poorly structured systems is less important in the operation of an engineered system than in its design. 

Accounting for executing the modeled behavior of agents and mission space is dependent on the classification of the agent-based system and support for collaborative model development and model repositories. Collaborative modeling enables dispersed modelers to develop modular model levels both coupled and uncoupled. 

In such application based cooperative working scene, model repositories are essential to support efficient and systematic model reuse and integration. Such repositories offer many benefits for maintaining and using models. Repositories can be built from widely employed relational systems to be scaleable and provide standard queries for access to and from model content. 

But many challenges remain to support collaborative development of levels based modular models and components within distributed and networked mission space. For example, a lot of work is required to develop workable schemes to assign ownership rights of enterprises and within enterprises and functional teams. participating in a model development effort.

1. Typical virtual enterprise to include large scale engineering systems involved in system build-- emphasis is put on operation of virtual enterprise and on the support for business process definition and supervision. 

2. Network topology situations show variable characteristics some enterprises can join or leave the alliance according to the phases of the business process or other market factors. 

3. Duration of some alliances of virtual enterprises established towards a single business opportunity, and are dissolved at the end of such process

4. Many sectors have established supply chains with an almost fixed structure-- little variation in terms of suppliers or clients during the virtual enterprise life cycle consider temporary interaction with non-member enterprises such as occasional suppliers

5. Supporting infrastructure must handle many virtual enterprise participation spaces and cope with strict cooperation and information visibility rules, to preserve the requirements of every individual enterprise

6. Dominant company defines "the rules of the game" and imposes its own standards on others in terms of business process models, information exchange mechanisms and access rights

7. Different organisation can be found in some supply chains, without a dominant company so nodes cooperate on an equal basis, preserving their autonomy, but joining their core competencies. 

8. Once successful alliance is formed, companies may realise the mutual benefits of joint control of resources and skills tends to create joint coordination structure 

9. Visibility scope related to the topology and coordination i.e., how far, along the network can one node see the virtual enterprise configuration like direct neighbors ie, suppliers, clients

10. Monitoring of order fulfillment, planning, scheduling, workload distribution are examples of advanced task supervision and virtual enterprise coordination to include extensive visibility scope agreed in enforced contracts among all members

​Fleet Forces Command announced a new initiative to address operational fleet and industrial base readiness through data analytics. “We need some fundamental changes in how we approach readiness, how we generate it, analyze it, measure it, integrate it, articulate what we need and predict what the return on our readiness investment might be.”

 Leaders want to see readiness improvements in three areas: operational readiness, or the effectiveness of today’s fleet to fight and win; structural readiness, to ensure the Navy has the right relationships and processes in place to respond quickly and agilely as challenges arise; and readiness of the industrial base or the readiness of the public and private shipyards and depots that maintain ships, submarines and aircraft.

For each of those pieces of readiness, leaders want metrics to aim for and data that could measure the success of readiness-building efforts – rather than relying on subjective assessments.

For example, “reviewing what we are being asked to do from the operational level down to the tactical level. So another way of looking at this is we want metrics associated with every item on the mission essential task list to answer the question, ready for what? 

And it will ensure we understand, using objective metrics, how any one unit’s readiness affects the fleet’s ability to perform its wider mission.”

The command wants examine the readiness of all enterprises – aviation, submarine, surface, information warfare and expeditionary communities – and create an actionable feedback loop between his command, the type commanders and the systems commands so all organisations can contribute to measuring and improving readiness. 

Units have tons of unused or underused data sitting around that would primarily support the industry readiness line of effort, and we need to find a  way to take advantage of that data they already have, as well as identify other data that should be collected to create a clearer picture of Navy and industrial base readiness.


“The final frontier of analytical capabilities is prescriptive analytics, where our automated analytical tools would accelerate our decision-making by suggesting decision options that might not have been aware if we had relied only on human actions alone.“

“To accomplish this, we are now establishing a Fleet Analytics Office that would develop the dashboards and reporting tools to see real-time what is going on and develop a risk matrix that helps us assess risk against the mission and drive accountability. And we also need to assess whether we have a modern information technology structure in place to support these efforts across the Navy’s readiness exercise.”

“The Revolutionize Readiness Campaign Plan is perhaps the most important line of effort we have as Fleet Forces” and was developed after working with leaders across industry. 

Leaders see a great opportunity for the Services to leverage data to improve readiness and performance by collecting data for the surface navy and understand how to take past data and use it for predictive purposes.

“There is a tremendous opportunity as we get performance data to get it into a database that’s accessible and authoritative and then map out against a sort of a model of each of our ships and assess how combat-ready that ship is.

 And then you can also use it with some artificial intelligence types of agents or capabilities to do even some predictive types of analysis – so as we get prepared to deploy, what are those things we need to be paying attention to, where are perhaps we most vulnerable based on historical patterns.

Navy won’t have to make much of an investment in hardware to do this but rather embrace new processes and “just doing business a little bit differently. So there’s a tremendous use for data-driven decisions improving our readiness.”

“We’re getting after this with this ‘Perform to Plan’ approach, we’re seeing some improvements already in aircraft maintenance. We’re turning that same approach to surface ship and submarines, and so great potential.”

Our conclusions call for the creation of an industrial policy to “inform current and future acquisition practices including “reengineering and qualification of new suppliers,” and to “modernise” industrial base to ensure readiness.

DoD policy calls for the expansion of “direct investment in the lower tier of the industrial base to address “critical bottlenecks, support fragile suppliers, and mitigate single points-of-failure.”

Recent efforts by Congress and the administration have been encouraging, but more must be done. Pentagon wants companies to find supply-chain weaknesses and volunteer information on weak spots in their industrial supply chains, as part of a broader review and war-gaming effort to discover potential failure points for the defense industrial base.

DoD requirements and contracting practices play a critical role in shaping the manufacturing and defense industrial base. Current organisational structure of DoD favors a top-down and requirements-driven process, often to the detriment of innovation. 

While it is possible to achieve technological breakthroughs or innovative capabilities through such a process, requirements-driven acquisition solicits solutions for specific capabilities rather than for outcomes, potentially imposing an opportunity cost on innovation.

There appears to be few opportunities for companies to offer services or capabilities that do not already fit within the DoD’s stated requirements and scope. The tendency to focus on requirements versus solutions, compounded by the various barriers to entry, cost of doing business, and skewed market incentives can inhibit competition and new entrants. 

Companies with established success in contracting space are often necessarily structured to comport to guidelines, rules, and regulations and are typically unlikely to be able or incentivised to challenge the requirements-driven process.  
   
Many of the current policies and practices of DoD strain the industrial base and reduce incentives to supply to DoD, resulting in an inability to meet national security demands, and a DoD challenged to meet its goals in an era of expanding strategic competition.

Pentagon is looking for industrial base risks to include sole source, single source, fragile suppliers, suppliers that may not be looking to stay in the market. there are specific concerns about some companies that DoD fails to “move the needle on” but which are vital to maintaining a technological edge.

Pentagon must look at how the industrial base will be stressed, could be stressed under specific operations to give DoD information it doesn’t currently have much metrics on by distributing a questionnaire to the defense industry to try and gather information about potential weak spots.  It’s a very targeted request where we give industry an opportunity to provide some information to help us with assessments

The threat to  industrial base has been years in the making, as supply chain deteriorate so Pentagon must focus on expanding programs like the manufacturing institutes to renew and broaden the production capacity of the defense industrial base since ability to procure goods critical to the common defense is threatened by inability to obtain commercial sub-components sometimes indirectly related DoD weapons systems.

Survey seeks to address flagging imbalances in the key sectors of the defense industrial base and establish policy for prioritising industrial base resilience. But the measure isn’t perfect. It needs to be calibrated to ensure national security leaders have complete visibility into a diverse industrial base with secure supply chains.

A useful exercise when working with groups of supply professionals, is to ask if their organisations measure supplier performance. But usually those who say yes are not satisfied with their supplier measurement systems. 

An unmistakable conclusion after reviewing the state of affairs associated with supplier performance measurement is that not much is written on this topic. What is written about it reveals overwhelming agreement about its importance. Yet the development of effective measurement systems is still on the “to do” list for many organisations, particularly smaller ones. 

Even though some companies  believe they have attained a “leading practice” level of supplier risk management, there is no shortage of examples where companies sustained painful hits  as a result such as delays in launch of major new products and services, or disruption of supply.

Why is effective supplier risk management so elusive? For starters, companies often lack a comprehensive view of the impact that suppliers can have on the organisation. Companies also struggle to obtain the data needed to assess. supplier risk, even though  some data , is readily available, .

Some companies rarely establish programs that go beyond monitoring. Structured risk responses are rarely planned proactively, leaving different functions to scramble to address risk reactively when it is identified.

Even organisations that boast mature systems of supplier metrics recognise that continuous improvement is an ongoing challenge—and that many such metrics systems have shortcomings. We have identified several shortcomings, and provide guidance about how to create an ideal supplier performance measurement and scorecard system. 

Supplier performance measurement is the business process that includes the methods and systems used to collect and provide information in order to measure, rate, or rank suppliers on a continuous basis. Many companies use the term “scorecard” to describe the report that conveys performance information to suppliers.

The types of scorecards in use typically fall into one of three categories—categorical, weighted point, or cost-based¹'s performance across different categories. For some items, this may be an effective way to evaluate supplier performance. 

As it relates to supplier scorecards, most supply chain organisations use a weighted point system that includes a variety of performance categories, provides weights for each category, and defines the scales used for scoring within each category. 

Cost-based systems are used least. It attempts to quantify the total cost of doing business with a supplier over time.  Some companies use a hybrid system comprising several of these approaches. 

No standard measurement approach exists across industries, although supply chain organisations should strive internally for some consistency, particularly with respect to the technical aspects of their systems. 

Some organisations have  joined consortiums that share best measurement practices or attempt to follow standards in supply chain operations metrics models. It does not make sense for every business unit or internal location to re-invent how they measure performance. The challenge today is to develop a measurement process and scorecard system that offers some flexibility to a company's internal operations while maintaining company-wide consistency.

Most supplier assessment capabilities and results are unsatisfactory.. Where supplier scorecards do exist, most are not designed well so at times it might be better if they were not used at all. Far too often, measurement is an activity that fails to lead to improved results. 

When a  consumer products company developed a scorecard to evaluate its suppliers-- substantially larger than the company  the experience was bad enough that this scorecard was not pilot-tested and was less than professional in appearance.

The system failed when many larger suppliers challenged the accuracy of the company's scores, particularly when the scores were lower than those received from the suppliers'  customers with more resource to put towards doing well in the evaluation. Suffice it to say  this experience deterred the company from moving forward with its measurement objectives.

Procurement teams must take a hard look at their measurement processes long before suppliers can challenge the legitimacy of the metrics. The processes must not turn into the kind of exercise that one supplier's executive described as “they present and we reject.”  

Another example highlights a variety of shortfalls that confront too many supplier measurement systems. Almost every supply chain organisation has at least considered developing a supplier scorecard system. Those that are serious about the process have most likely committed serious time, budget, and resources toward development and maintenance of systems of measurement. 

One such company's system appears ideal. Do senior managers need a ranking of supplier performance sorted by product type group? Do they want a listing of the company's best or worst performing suppliers?  This, and much more, is available at the push of a button.

But during a training session at this company, an instructor asked a buyer to name one of his best performing suppliers—what the company called an elite supplier. The intent was to use examples of real suppliers to demonstrate the data features of the system. 

Without hesitation, the buyer provided a supplier's name. But from across the room, another participant responded by saying that the supplier just named was one of the worst suppliers that his operations group worked with every day.

How can one person cite a supplier as being worthy of preferred status while another, in the same supply chain organisation, indicates they would rather discontinue the relationship with that supplier? And what are the dangers of a system that awards high scores to poorly performing suppliers?

These differences of opinion led to some conclusions that almost everyone in attendance could agree upon. The consensus was that although the scorecard system was supported by an extensive database that allowed all kinds of rigorous analyses, the data to support the system was still collected and keyed in manually. 

Furthermore, many scorecard items required subjective judgments. On top of this, most buyers had responsibility for inputting data periodically for dozens of suppliers, a heavy burden on top of their “normal” workload. 

Many in attendance also agreed that the data for the scorecards was keyed in just before, and sometimes after the cutoff period, meaning that the emphasis was hardly on the quality of the data.  Attendees also acknowledged that supplier scores were used as an indicator of a buyer's job performance. 

The group also agreed their suppliers were held to the same criteria and weights, even though not all suppliers were equally important to the company's success. Participants further agreed that internal customers or stakeholders had no way to be part of the measurement process.  

There was also some confusion about what kind of organisation qualified as a supplier since some suppliers provided material from multiple locations.  Finally, no clear agreement emerged that the measurement process was contributing to higher performance. 

What are some lessons here?  Clearly, an effective scorecard system requires much more than a fancy database that can present data in many ways. While that capability is important, technical capabilities do not guarantee system success. And scorecards should not ignore the voices of internal customers. Managers at manufacturing plants, warehouses, distribution centers, and logistics hubs are often perfectly positioned to evaluate suppliers' day-to-day performance. 

Another lesson is scorecards often place a serious work burden on the individuals responsible for maintaining them, which often results in scorecards that are late or completed at the last minute—which raises concerns about data integrity.  Is a reliance on subjective and last-minute evaluations affecting the integrity of the scores? 

A final lesson is that scorecard systems can drive the wrong behaviour. The results will be skewed—and not fit for their intended purpose—if a buyer's  performance evaluation is based only partly on the performance of their suppliers. 

It’s even worst if their performance is being determined by scorecards teams are responsible for completing. The conflict of interest is obvious. While most everyone at the company may agree that supplier measurement can be a good thing, it is also evident that the system in place is far from ideal. 

Implementing an effective scorecard model requires the right foundation – an operating model for supplier performance scorecards. Smart companies must shoot for processes/policies, effective performance management, data, architecture and tools and’ service delivery models must all be aligned in support of risk management capabilities.

No doubt, effective supplier relationship management takes work, but with all that is at stake, companies should take stock of their current capabilities and approach for scorecard risk management and aim for an integrated model that includes the following characteristics:

1, The Enterprise Measurement System Allows Scoring Flexibility 

For many companies, an integrated, up-to-date view of enterprise relationships with suppliers and other third parties is not readily available. Organisations need to analyze their spend on an ongoing basis, identify active suppliers, and clean up and normalise the data to arrive at a complete view of the supply base.

Companies should identify suppliers that drive the greatest level of risk. Which suppliers pose the greatest risk to the organisation’s major product launches, growth plans or projects? Which suppliers can disrupt ongoing operations if their deliveries are interrupted? Which suppliers pose the greatest risk to the organisation’s bottom line?

2. Don’t  Fall into Trap of “One Size Fits All” Approach 

Smart Supplier Risk  Systems will allow adjustments to the performance categories and their weights to reflect the realities of different supply requirements. The best scorecards align directly with the outcomes sought from doing business with a particular supplier. Assign  specialists in cost, technology, quality, and logistics who are responsible for posting supplier data periodically on a global supplier portal. 

If a supply chain organisation is serious about measuring most of its suppliers, then the less critical suppliers should receive a basic scorecard—even  one that is categorical.  At some point, depending on the level of effort required to obtain scorecard data, the cost to measure a supplier could outweigh the value of measuring that supplier. When this is the case, a logical response is to not measure, measure less frequently, or simplify the type of scorecard used.

3. Suppliers with More than One Location Receive Multiple Scorecards

Some systems are geared toward  counting  suppliers as a single entity, yet many suppliers provide material from multiple locations. To aggregate different locations into a single scorecard can be misleading. It also makes it harder to assign scores to specific locations. 

A possible solution is to evaluate each supplier's shipping locations across a basic set of operational metrics such as cost, quality, and delivery while the supplier as a corporate entity is evaluated by a set of higher-level metrics to include assessments of supplier innovation, responsiveness, and willingness to invest in the buyer-seller relationship.

4. Internal Customers Evaluate Supplier Performance

In the  information age, internal customers should be able to submit comments and ratings about a supplier's performance directly into a scorecard system. These individuals are usually in the best position to evaluate a supplier's operational performance.

Procurement teams should consider allowing suppliers to enter a Web-based portal to view any free-form comments or scores submitted by internal customers. This supports the efficient and open exchange of information, something that is widely practiced with other supply chain applications like sharing demand forecasts,  Most supply chain experts would agree that information-sharing across the supply chain is a good thing. So why should sharing of supplier performance data be any different?

5. Scorecards are Reviewed and Acknowledged by Suppliers' Top Managers

Key executives at each supplier should receive electronic copies of the scorecards. Perhaps most importantly, the party sending the scorecard should track acknowledgements that the scorecards were received and reviewed, along with any responses to specific queries. 

Forwarding scorecards directly to executive managers supports at least two purposes.  First, these executives will have access to information that their own personnel may not willingly share. More than one executive has been caught off guard because they were unaware of issues that affected customers. Second: Information will likely reach the individuals who can effect meaningful change when it is required. 

6. Scorecards are Updated in Real Time

Too many scorecards still resemble a batch updating system that features periodic input of data submitted manually each time period. In a perfect world, anyone who is granted access to a scorecard system should be able to view supplier performance levels in real time. Whenever an event occurs such as a  quality evaluation  at a receiving dock, data records should flow seamlessly into the scorecard database with real-time updating of supplier performance. Of all the attributes of an ideal measured system described in this article, this is the one that is rarely implemented.

For real-time updating to work, the scorecard system must be linked to other supply chain constituencies. Any system that stresses objective rather than subjective assessment, particularly in a real-time environment, should receive serious consideration.

 It's safe to conclude most supply chain systems are moving toward real-time data visibility. Some purchasing organisations are beginning to rely on suppliers to self-report and submit their performance to the scorecard system on a frequent basis. A few leading companies are even beginning to solicit performance data from or about second-tier suppliers. 

7. The Metrics Database Allows User Flexibility in Retrieving and Displaying Data

An effective system will not only generate the scorecard itself; it will enable data to be presented in a variety of reporting formats, along with easy generation of useful reports. Various on-demand reports can show side-by-side supplier rankings, demonstrate performance changes by category, and highlight the suppliers that improved or deteriorated in performance over a certain period. A database that allows the slicing and dicing of raw data is an essential element of an ideal scorecard system.

Companies should consider many different types of data, from a variety of sources in order to gain an understanding of risk, such as, vendor management plans for those that have subcontractors to support business requirements.. Some data such as capacities is not routinely captured nor is it readily available from a single reliable source.

8. The Measurement System Provides Early-warning Performance Alerts

Most measurement systems are reactive in that they report what has happened, not what is likely to happen. As with a statistical process control system, an ideal measurement system would be able to “look ahead” to spot troublesome trends and non-random changes in a supplier's performance before it becomes out of control. An ideal system would notify supply chain managers of potential problems before the impacts of those problems are even realised. 

The system must have predictive capabilities. Consider the possibility of generating early warnings when using advance shipping notices. Any time data reveals a possible late delivery after comparing expected transit times against a due date, a material planner would receive a warning of the potential delay. Or consider real-time GPS tracking systems that could reveal that supply chain delays are occurring, with a notification sent to the appropriate personnel. It is almost always better to be proactive.    

9. Suppliers Can View and Compare their Performance Online

For many years, almost every supply chain organisation refused to identify the scores and names of competing suppliers within a category or product type  group. Later, most organisations became more willing to show relative comparisons against competing suppliers . The time has come to accept that scorecards present a good way to create competition among suppliers. That means permitting and enabling them to access their scores online, complete with comparisons to other suppliers in the same or similar product type  groups..

Performance benchmarking involves comparing products, practices, processes, or strategies against key competitors or companies that are considered best-in-class. Benchmarking methodologies can involve working directly with other companies to compare scorecard practices, searching databases and the Internet to find information on performance measurement and working with professional contacts to obtain scorecard information. 

It's a challenge for supply chain organisations today to step back and take an unbiased view of their supplier performance measurement systems. The objective should be to take a poor measurement system and make it better—or to transform a good system into an excellent one. Any gaps that exist between the current and future states—and there could be many—will require a clear plan to bring an existing system closer to a preferred system.

10. . Develop Your Organisation’s Playbook and Tools for Addressing Supplier Risk

The organisation’s key actions for risk mitigation must be identified and formalised as “playbooks” to enable structured, repeatable and coordinated execution across the enterprise. Playbooks should include specific action plans with repeatable triggers, procedures, roles, responsibilities and measures. This entails clear definition of triggers, cross-functional execution steps and workflows, roles and metrics, as well as other elements. When executing to a playbook an organization can address risk more quickly, efficiently and effectively.

Supplier risk management works best when risks are predicted in advance and when they are related to the type and magnitude of business impact that they can drive. Understanding risk in the context of the business activities at risk is vital for prioritisation and for mobilising  appropriate response. This step requires a well conceived framework and an assessment model for supplier risk analysis. It also requires linkage of supplier risks to the products and services  that they may impact. 

New tech for supplier risk scorecards is a vital enabler. In an era when almost too much information is available, there is no excuse for not remaining current regarding the trends and technologies that relate to supplier performance scorecards.

​Readiness is a concept military types should love—and that‘s part of the problem. We are quantitative people by nature and place a high premium on objective metrics. We crave precision. But formulas for gauging readiness neglect intangible factors of enormous consequence.

 Not everything that counts can be counted just as not everything that can be counted counts. For instance, a military institution’s culture—its deep-seated worldview and way of doing things—permeates, shapes, or perhaps misshapes everything it does. 

How do you judge, with precision, whether the cultural fundamentals are sound?

Not solely through clerical work. Estimating a force’s fitness for battle is never easy—in large part because the authorities define the term readiness vaguely at best. 

The Joint Chiefs of Staff, for example, define readiness as “the ability of military forces to fight and meet the demands of assigned missions.” Well. I’m glad we cleared that up. Readiness means being ready to do what you exist to do.

U.S. Fleet Forces Command adds to the explanation pieced together by the Joint Chiefs. Fleet Forces Command raises, trains, and equips naval forces and delivers them to combatant commanders to execute missions in the field. 

The command oversees everything from budgets to logistics to maintenance to education and training policy. It vows to “integrate readiness resource metrics for personnel, equipment, supply, training, and ordnance to provide a comprehensive means of assessing capabilities-based operations.” 

To gauge readiness, it seems, demands that the leadership gauge just about everything a naval service is or does. And to do so using metrics.

That’s as it should be. The danger stems from our natural human tendency to observe and quantify what we can quantify, exclude the intangibles, tally up the results, and declare our services “ready” based on this objective and orderly—but highly partial—process of measuring, calculating, and aggregating. 

We could trick ourselves through fixating on what can be counted and neglecting the rest. Your typical intelligence specialist should be taken to task for counting what they can detect—ships, planes, tanks, stuff of all types—and discounting what remains out of sight. 

Net assessments tend to yield a fragmentary picture deriving from fragmentary data. They mislead if taken too literally.

It’s a constant guessing game when it comes to explaining how to size up an adversary. Commanders must “guess, so to speak,” about what response our actions will summon forth from the enemy and from third parties when we take up arms. 

We are simply warning military leaders and officials not to be enamored by objective-seeming measures of military might, to discount the sheer mass of data that need to be measured, or to disregard the subjective nature of crucial data. 

These are estimates, after all, and should be taken as provisional. This goes to the nature of martial affairs. To judge the potential of the services ability to conduct combat, leaders must devise metrics to infer the state of seamanship, combat prowess, and fighting spirit in the ranks. 

Let’s not quantify what we can quantify, ignore the rest because we find it difficult, and declare ourselves fit for action.

Measuring readiness sounds like a bookkeeping problem. Reading too much into the numbers could delude us about our prospects in strategic competition and war.

Once DoD constructs a road map it can develop a set of performance metrics or key performance indicators to ensure it knows when it is meeting its objectives. Organisations should choose a limited number of metrics and align executive to management-level measures. Continuous improvement in an organisation relies on “measuring, measuring, and measuring again.” 

The current interest in performance measurements has led to a variety of supporting
adages or cliches in the industry, such as: “Anything measured improves., “What you measure is what you get., Anything measured gets done. And “You can’t manage what you do not measure.”

These are not new business ideas, but there are a few new twists. Using measurements
to support manufacturing operations stem from time and motion studies of operations used to manage production lines and warehouse operations. 

But these techniques led to exaggerated business processes that transitioned into “running a business by the stopwatch” with executives treating staff as if they were highly reliable, predictable machines to be monitored and controlled. Over time, the workplace’s view of
performance measurement were replaced by a focus on a measuring a business’ performance rather than that of the individual.

Companies have expended significant amounts of time and effort to re-engineer their supply chains through business process change and technology focused on implementing integrated supply chain management principles. But despite the applied resources, there has been little sign of realised benefits since, they generally lack formal approaches and tools needed to measure these improvements.

Measurement is important since it affects behaviour that impacts supply chain performance to provide the means by which a company can assess whether its supply chain has improved or degraded. Companies have tracked performance based largely on accounting principles certainly important in assessing whether or not operational changes are improving the condition of an enterprise, but insufficient to measure supply chain performance.

Some of the reasons include that measures tend to be historically oriented and not focused on providing a predictive forward-looking perspective, Measures do not relate to important strategic performance, like war fighter customer service targets and product quality and the measures do not directly tie to operational effectiveness and efficiency.

Balanced Scorecard Approach recommends the use of executive information systems
tracking a limited number of balanced metrics that are closely aligned to strategic objectives. While not specifically developed for supply chain performance measurement, Balanced Scorecard principles provide excellent guidance to follow when doing it. The approach recommends a small number of balanced supply chain measures be tracked.

One of the criticisms of traditional approaches is that it focuses on short-term
results, but providing little insight into the success of an enterprise towards generating long-term value. For example, DoD can report many successful  time periods, while simultaneously shortchanging its readiness of war fighter  customer base by not applying adequate resources towards product quality or new product innovation.

While some approaches may  provide guidance for supply chain measurement,
they provide less help in assessing specific metrics to be used. A key driving principle promoted by the Balanced Scorecard, is that measures should be aligned to strategic objectives. But supply chain strategy differs for every company and depends upon its current competencies and strategic direction.

Companies, for example, can generally fall into the following developmental
stages that will dictate the types of measures and the degrees to which they
will need to focus:

Firstly, metrics where this  focus on individual functional departments. Second, metrics  focused on cross-functional processes, not individual function departments. Third, metrics focused on external and cross-enterprise metrics.

Most companies have focused their performance measurement on achieving functional gains aimed at integrating their supply chains and increasing their degree of enterprise-wide integration and extended enterprise integration. In order to achieve these types of objectives, their performance measurement systems will need to align to include: Function-based measures, Process-based measures, Cross-enterprise measures and number of measures to be use and alignment of executive to management-level measures.

A major problem encountered with most performance measurement systems is that they are functionally focused. Within these systems, each functional area measures its performance in its own terms, with individuals evaluated based on their ability to meet objectives consistent with performance measures.

Teams working under these measurement systems tend to drive operations toward improving their own area’s performance, frequently at the expense of performance in other functional areas. When each functional area sets its performance measures in isolation from those of others, it often leads to deficits in functional sharing between teams and conflicting organisational goals.

When manufacturers use the following types of function-based supply chain-related performance measures in isolation of each other, there is a tendency to create conflicting goals among functional areas as follows: Customer Service/Sales, Logistics, Manufacturing , and Purchasing.

It is apparent  use of only function-based measures could drive teams toward changing functional performance in entirely different directions. These types of measures alone have reinforced deficits in sharing between functional teams, reducing the effectiveness of many supply chains and fostering arms-length transactions among departments, leading to processes that are slow to respond. Performance improvement initiatives get focused on a single objective that frequently runs counter to increasing the efficiency of the total supply
chain. .

To help integrate their supply chains, companies are starting to improve on existing deficits in team communication by organising around cross-functional processes. This is done by either creating departments responsible for an overall process or creating cross-functional teams that drive an overall process, such as: Order fulfillment, New product development/introduction and Total cycle time.

To support these organisational changes, companies are supplementing function-based measures with some process-based performance measures. While this approach does not advocate the total elimination of function-based measures, it places focus on the performance of an overall process, using these measures as diagnostic information to assess what is affecting overall performance.

The cross-functional process approach to measuring supply chains is applicable for inter- as well as intra-enterprise processes. For example, many would agree the two most important bottom-line measures of overall supply chain performance relate to: availability of the right products at the point of consumption and total landed cost to get the products to the point of consumption including all material, manufacturing, transportation, warehousing, and inventory costs along the supply chain.

While these are recommended supply chain measures, it is rare for one organisation to control its whole supply chain performance. Supply chains are typically comprised of many value-adding trading partners that control the portions in which they transact business. While this might be the case, supply chain tactics principles dictate that significant benefits can accrue when integrated inter-enterprise processes are in place, to link and optimise the supply chain.

To ensure the effectiveness of cross-enterprise processes, a company should measure performance of parts of their supply chain that lie outside their own enterprise. This leads to the question of “Should you measure what is not within the domain of your enterprise or what you cannot control?”

Most executives would answer “no” to that question, stating that it is useless to measure anything on which you have little or no control. But in situations where performance directly or indirectly impacts the availability or cost of products at the point of consumption, the answer should be “yes” to that questions.

At times it does makes sense to measure what you cannot control, as you may uncover a deficiency in your supply chain’s performance. Once found, initiatives can be developed to address the problem and the performance measures can be used as the “call to action.” These initiatives usually involve some form of program aimed at taking some level of control of upstream or downstream supply chain activities – extending beyond one’s enterprise.

As more companies implement supply chain programs, they will be placing greater emphasis on cross-enterprise processes, extending beyond their enterprise. This will lead to the need to implement performance measurement systems that include some external measures, including some for processes that lie outside of a company’s domain of control.

A major challenge for many companies when developing a supply chain performance measurement process is limiting the number of measures. Most companies are involved in complex business operations that span across multiple business divisions and geographical boundaries, involving many  sub-processes, tasks, and organisational departments. 

Wanting to measure everything, there is a tendency to measure too much. The number of measures needs to be limited to ensure the process is not too cumbersome to administer.  To ensure that a reasonable number of metrics is defined, an organising framework is required to select only those that are most important. 

A key-enabling concept taken from the Balanced Scorecard approach is to focus the measurement process on managing the business, not monitoring and controlling it. Measures should be aligned to supply chain performance objectives to be achieved, not to mandate teams are adhering to managerial practices and directions. In this way supply chain performance, not actions, are measured.

To establish a rational set of performance measures, businesses need to start with an understanding of the strategic supply chain objectives of a company’s executive team. For example, to what degree is the company trying to achieve functional, enterprise-wide integration and extended enterprise integration excellence?

Once understood, a limited and balanced set of measures  directly aligned to strategic objectives needs to be developed with supply chain performance indicators according to  strategic intent to include a balance of cause and effect type metrics . In addition to executives, teams also need more detailed performance measures to track both tactical and operational types of activities. 

Using lower level measures, managers can gauge how well teams are doing relative to the overall strategic goals set in place by the executive team. In addition, lower-level metrics enable executives to drill-down into the more diagnostic metrics, detecting where corrective actions are needed.

Targets for supply chain performance measures must be established to framework for determining the answer to questions that arise when evaluating a performance metric: Has the metric improved from the last time it was reviewed? By how much? How close is the metric to where it should be?

Efforts aimed at picking a set of balanced metrics, performance targets need to be jointly, not individually, developed. To achieve objectives some metrics may need to increase and others may need to decrease. Each metric in the set has to be viewed in conjunction with the others to determine its proper target. For example, in a situation where a company is trying to achieve same day delivery, delivery times should decrease, while warehouse handling and transportation costs might actually increase.

So while there a variety of ways in which to set performance targets, they should always be jointly set in the context of strategic objectives. Generally, there several methods that can be used to set performance targets: Historically based targets, External benchmark, Internal benchmarks and Stretch Goal targets.

Historically based target setting is the most frequently used among all the methods, because it is easier. In using this method, performance targets are based on historical baseline levels.  Once the baseline metrics are established, the same procedures and systems that were used to establish the baseline numbers can also be used on an ongoing basis to measure changes in the metrics.

Using external benchmarks to help set performance targets is currently popular, but difficult to use in practice. In general, benchmarking has been in the business limelight for a long time, with companies looking outside their operations for best practices and performance comparisons. This method relies on collecting information on performance metrics of companies internal and external to one’s industry.

While appealing, the external benchmarking method has a major shortcoming in determining if a set of companies are available/comparable because big amount of analysis is required to ensure that external benchmarks are meaningful, especially when using data from companies that operate within different business environments e.g., differing products or sales channels, But external benchmarks, especially from one’s competitors, may be extremely important towards keeping an organisation supply chain competitive.

Once external benchmarking metrics are collected, a company’s internal metrics are generated and a gap analysis is done – typically looking at the best-in-class within their own industry as well as external to it. This is followed by more analysis to assess the degree to which the company can achieve these performance levels, including what business practice changes are necessary to close the gaps.

Performance target setting using internal benchmarks is a common approach, since it requires only internal measures usually operating in similar business environments.. Within this method, comparable functional departments, processes, and facilities within a company are measured in the same way. For example, there may be a set of metrics in use for all warehousing facilities, another set for all manufacturing plants, and another set for all customer service departments. 

While this internal benchmarking method is easier to implement, the organization is stretched to achieve better performance. That is, using a “best-in-class” internal organisation to set targets may limit the company’s performance relative to its competitors. The use of Stretch Goals target setting is a relatively new method of conducting an analysis to project how its supply chain performance could be improved by implementing the business changes necessary to achieve these improvements and put a set of performance targets in place based on estimates made during the analysis. 

While conducting an optimisation analysis is an intuitively appealing method for determining performance targets, it is not always the easiest to do. Another alternate approach involves the use of supply chain simulation analysis that includes conducting what-if studies on initiatives to improve performance. The results of these studies could then be used to set theoretical targets. 

For example, a “what-if” study might be conducted to assess inventory reductions that might accrue from statistical stock setting. Estimated reductions would be used to reset performance targets for inventory turns. Setting performance targets on a stretch goal basis is most useful for insuring balanced set of metrics is developed. Often, only by doing a thorough analysis can one assess how an initiative would impact comprehensive aspects within a supply chain.

In practice, a combination of these performance target-setting methods must be used. No one method is practical for determining targets since you cannot always get a full set of comparable benchmarking information or conduct the extensive analyses needed to develop a full set of potential  performance targets.

Application vendors are faced with a challenge when trying to provide supply chain performance measurement functionality within their products. Users often wish to include metrics relating to information not residing within the vendor’s application database.

This is especially the case when measuring the performance of cross-functional and inter-enterprise processes, which involve drawing information about any functional department within a company, or about customer/supplier activities. Most advanced planning and scheduling applications focus on the future, rarely concerned with what went on in the past except relative to measuring forecast errors.

Traditionally, supply chain application vendors have focused their development efforts on enabling planning, scheduling, and execution, targeted toward supporting decision-making, not tracking historical performance. Some vendors have functionality to report historical supply chain performance focused around either functional or planning-related metrics. 

One application reports on historical product performance by providing users with shop floor data collection applications and uses constraint-based costing methods to assess product level production performance. Similar to other supply chain solutions, the application provides refined estimates of manufacturing performance representing only a portion of the overall supply chain performance measures needed.

We have concluded that there is no one recommended approach or set of measures to be used to measure one’s supply chain performance. While promoting the importance of measuring supply chain performance, experts really have no definitive set of metrics to recommend. Application vendors we polled enable a limited range of supply chain performance measures and are improving and planning to add more functionality to their product sets.

For those users just getting started, implementing supply chain performance measurement should not be done all at once. For example, one could start by first implementing executive-level scorecard measures in a manual fashion. This could then be followed up with more automation, through the use of application tools and the addition of managerial-level metrics. 

As application vendors develop more capabilities in the area of performance measurement further automation of the process can be implemented over time. We recommend the following steps be taken when implementing supply chain performance improvement and measurement:

Have executives articulate the strategic supply chain objectives, including the degree of focus to be placed on achieving functional, enterprise-wide integration and extended enterprise integration.

Define more tactical and operational, executive/team level objectives and measures  providing diagnostic information on whether executive objectives are being met. Breaking down the higher-level measures typically does this. For example, these might be measures for a particular plant’s cost for a specific class of material.

Identify supply chain initiatives that specifically address the executive and team performance improvement objectives. For example, this might include a core supplier program reducing the number of material suppliers to ones with the lowest cost, meeting quality standards.

Establish targets for all metrics defined, using a combination of historical performance, external/internal benchmarks, and estimates  obtained from operational quantitative analysis of the supply chain initiatives. A timeline for achieving the targets needs to be established for each metric, consistent with the schedules developed for the supply chain initiatives.

Implement new initiatives in concert with a formal measurement system to
keep track of performance improvement over time, using a combination of whatever vendor application technology makes sense.

While these steps are useful for getting started, ongoing supply chain performance measurement requires steps be revisited on a routine basis, as objectives change and new programs and initiatives are undertaken. Keeping the measurement/metrics process aligned to supply chain objectives and activities will provide the information
needed to drive your supply chain’s performance, helping to ensure that resources are appropriately applied and desired strategic change is happening.

There are several lessons/questions for your company to get started in taking action to meet important goals of measuring supply chain performance:

1. Measurements are important to directly controlling mobile vehicle behaviour and indirectly to performance 

2. A few key measurements will go a long way toward keeping a company on track towards achieving its supply chain improvement objectives – like those on a speedometer and a gas gauge.

3. Seemingly relevant, but cumbersome, measurements are of little use, and are possibly a hindrance, in helping to improve supply chain performance –like the odometer in the car.

4. Picking the wrong measures and leaving out important ones could lead to supply chain performance degradation – like running out of gas.

5. Driving a supply chain based only on after-the-fact performance measures, like losing an important customer is not very effective like the way getting speeding tickets and running out of gas is an expensive way to drive a car.

6. Must decide for yourself why is selecting performance measurement important?

7. What general approaches are available to measure supply chains?

8. What methods are available for setting performance targets?

9. . What are application vendors doing to support supply chain performance
measurement?

10. What are the first practical steps your company must take to get started?

Massive armoured vehicle force-on-force mechanised air-ground attack and long-range weapons are all soon to be elements of combat scenarios taken up in major wargames.

“We are going to be doing table top war games to see what kinds of things we will need in our platforms to counter threats,” 

Wargames pit friendly “blue” teams against “red” teams acting like major adversaries. The exercise can involve maps, intelligence data, terrain and geographic factors as well as specifics regarding whatever populations or countries are involved. They are often literally on a table top with nearby computers, simulations and methods of data analysis, or in some cases they can be as large as moving structures on the floor of a gymnasium.

“Through a series of structured questions, you have leaders make decisions. In a table top you get reactions. You may even have players that act like a local population. You put it in context of geopolitical and tactical circumstance.

By emphasising that these wargames would be designed to identify enemy threats, its important to capture, replicate or precisely mirror  weapons, tactics, strategies and force structure of specific high-tech adversaries.

While never exact, these kinds of wargames strive to closely approximate specific weapons systems, armored vehicles, missiles and drones a particular enemy force would have.

“If you can do it based on real-world intel, then you can do it on grounded projections.”

What would it look like if a “red” force launched a massive air-ground invasion? The blue team would consist of Combatant Commanders making decisions in response, taking adversary tanks, missiles, drones and weapons into account.

“How many combat vehicles does an enemy have? Or let’s say an enemy has a bullet that goes 1000 miles - let’s wargame what that means. Just because their weapons may be able to shoot a certain range, that does not mean they can hit a target. What kinds of sensors do they have? What kind of network?“

Unlike computer simulations which rely have more specifics embedded, wargames better address situations with more unknowns and assumptions. Both wargames and simulations are designed to test an ability to respond to specific actions and attacks made by a “red” force playing the enemy role
“Wargames include evidence based analytics. Eventually you have to apply experience. You cannot simply opine around a table.

For example, what should the response be if the adversary closes off a port, cuts of supply lines or uses air assets to destroy long range weapons? The amount of equipment, details about weapons capability and the exact configuration of an adversary force are replicated by the wargame.

Wargaming offers distinct models for decision-making. “One model is based upon adversary capabilities and the other on adversary intentions.

Battle damage assessments are of great significance in wargames. For instance, what happens if large portions of a force are wiped out by an attacking force? What kinds of options does that leave a commander?
The wargames are designed to encompass the full range of factors.

Losing a wargame is seen as a great development.

“If the red team outdoes you or comes up with something you are not prepared for, that’s a successful wargame because you want a realistic adversary. In this case you learn something you did not know.”


Navy is expanding its attack submarine war game strategy to further emphasise enhanced “spy” missions like intelligence, surveillance reconnaissance missions to quietly patrol shallow waters near coastline - scanning for adversary enemy submarines, surface ships and coastal threats.

Improved undersea navigation and detection technology, using new sonar, increased computer automation and artificial intelligence, enable quieter, faster movements in littoral waters where enemy mines, small boats and other threatening assets often operate.

Virginia-Class submarines are engineered with a “Fly-by-Wire” capability which allows the ship to quietly linger in shallow waters without having to surface or have each small move controlled by a human operator.

With “Fly-by-Wire” technology, a human operator will order depth and speed, allowing AI tools to direct the movement of the planes and rudder to maintain course and depth.

The ships can be driven primarily through AI code and electronics, thus freeing up time and energy for an operator who does not need to manually control each small manoeuvre. Previous Los Angeles-Class submarines rely upon manual, hydraulic controls.

This technology, using upgradable and fast-growing AI applications, widens the mission envelope for the attack submarines by vastly expanding their ISR potential. Using real-time analytics and an instant ability to draw upon an organize vast data-bases of information and sensor input, computer algorithms can now perform a range of procedural functions historically performed by humans to increase speed of manoeuvre and an attack submarine's ability to quickly shift course, change speed or alter depth positioning when faced with attacks.

A closer-in or littoral undersea advantage, Navy strategy documents explain, can increase “ashore attack” mission potential along with ISR-empowered anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare operations.

“We are uniquely capable of, and often best employed in, stealthy, clandestine and independent operations-- we exploit the advantages of undersea concealment which allow us to conduct undetected operations such as strategic deterrent patrols, intelligence collection, Special Operations Forces support, non-provocative transits, and repositioning.”

The Navy is implementing elements of this strategy with its recently launched Virginia-Class attack submarine engineered with a host of new, unprecedented undersea technologies.

Many innovations are underway and tested as prototypes for many years and are now operational as new subs enter service; service technology developers have, in a general way, said the advances in undersea technologies built, integrated, tested and now operational to include quieting technologies for the engine room to make the submarine harder to detect, a new large vertical array and additional "quieting" coating materials for the hull.

While firepower and attack weapons are naturally still a major area of focus for Virginia-Class submarines, the expanding ISR mission scope made possible by new technologies has provided key inspiration for senior Navy developers and members of Congress who have been working vigorously to increase the size of the attack submarine fleet.

Land weapons, port activities and other adversary movements in coastal or island areas are more difficult for deeper draft surface ships to access, often complicating surveillance missions – without giving away their position. Surface ships and the drones or aircraft they operate could, in a variety of operational environments, be more “detectable” to adversary radar and sensors when compared to attack submarines.

“The most important feature for manoeuvre in littoral waters is the fly-by-wire control system, whereby computers in the control center electronically adjust the submarine's control surfaces, a significant improvement from the hydraulic systems used in legacy subs.

Next-generation sonar technology, woven into Virginia-Class subs, is engineered to work in tandem with “Fly-by-Wire” technology to better identify threats operating at various depths and speed.

The new submarines also have what’s called a Large Aperture Bow conformal array sonar system – designed to listen for an acoustic ping, analyze the return signal, and provide the location and possible contours of enemy ships, submarines and other threats.

To understand autonomous weapons, think about electronic warfare. Parsing what detected signals matter is an electronic warfare skill that can possible be designated to artificial intelligence. 

For as much as conflicts have been defined by drones and drone strikes, those missions are only possible because the sky is empty of hostile aircraft, and because the electromagnetic spectrum is free of interference. This permissiveness, however, is hardly a guarantee in the future and even in certain theaters in the present.

If the machines that are today remotely operated are to take part in future conflicts, they will need to operate on their own, with only minimal human control. The technologies that will make that possible are broadly grouped together under the subject of autonomy, 

Automated defenses are used to counter automated attacks and speeds faster and scales larger than humans can work on their own. There is autonomy in guided munitions, especially loitering weapons, which operate on their own from launch until impact. Waging electronic warfare will require both approaches: machines that can automatically counter the actions of other machines, and vehicles that can navigate through fields of interference on their own.

“There's no way that a human is going to be able to keep up with these new generations of cognitive electronic warfare systems that are constantly scanning the electromagnetic spectrum and jamming software where it can. Humans just won't be able to keep up with that. The expectation is once again, for electronic warfare, machines will fight against their machines.” 

Electronic warfare is a data-rich field, as signals can be captured, recorded and studied in a way that most information on a battlefield cannot. That data, combined with machine learning that trains AI on how to interpret, understand, and counter those signals, makes cognitive electronic warfare an area where iteration on software is likely to yield outsized results
. 
Having enough bandwidth available to allow pilots at the base to directly control drones flying in remote spaces is already something of a logistical triumph. As cognitive electronic warfare gets better, and the cost of putting that interference in place gets lower, directly piloting is going to be hard, especially from across the planet but even from closer bases.

Autonomy greatly reduces the amount of data an uncrewed vehicle needs to send back to the humans supervising it. As sensors get cheaper, collecting that information will be easier, but the bottleneck isn’t in the collection. It’s in the transmission.

“Getting the bandwidth to send it back will be an enormous challenge. No question about that. The communication environments of the future battlefield, will really be challenged by congestion and it will be challenged by active and probably effective interference by the adversary. So teleoperation is a challenge.”

Lower bandwidth in the field encourages autonomy, and autonomy in vehicles then means that the humans move from a dedicated pilot or sensor operator role into a sort of supervisory position, a commander of robots who can only reliable communicate in low-data messages.

Contested and denied electronic spectrum make areas once open to remote vehicles now hostile and possibly outright impossible. Designing machines that can get around those barriers, that can perform military tasks and missions even if they are out of contact from the humans that ordered them into action, is an adaptation to the environment. 

It is a way to preserve the utility of uncrewed vehicles, without sending humans into that same danger. Or it a way to make sure that, when soldiers or marines find themselves trapped in a fight, rescue can still come in robotic form.

Autonomous machines are the tangible edge of what future war might look like. It’s the electromagnetic spectrum, invisible and always present and causing interference.

Pentagon imagines automation as seamless as in a strategy game

With a switch click, unknown tanks and infantry are clear, as our tank-commanding avatar holds a tablet with the adversary positions illuminated in red. Finding these adversaries are an array of systems, from satellites to drone swarms to uncrewed reconnaissance vehicles on the ground. 

Another click, and the hostile forces on the screen are replaced by scorch marks, the tank commander’s tablet illuminated with the range of strikes called in from air and land forces.

While it exists in simulations and in games, perfect information on a battlefield remains an impossibility. Creating a “red force tracker;” that is, an intelligence collection process that provides real time information on where enemies are at all times, is a stretch for current technology. But it is one that could get closer to reality with autonomous robots scouting and providing information. This would take a great degree of information integration and distillation at the point of collection to work.

Rather than remote-control or teleoperated machines, future machines could be autonomous enough to require little human supervision, employ complex tactics, and to allow for a high degree of coordination with little need for communication.

“If we want to reduce load on soldiers, we have to get the equivalent of Siri for robots.  We have to get the same interaction from a human-computer interface that a tank commander has with its driver, where it can maneuver in that space.”

Consider example of the tablet-commanded robot scouts and called-in strikes. This is a vision of military command where a human sits at the center of an autonomous body of sensors, perhaps gives them objectives but not specific targets, and then lets the machines process information to convert objects recorded with cameras into coordinates for where airplanes and artillery should place explosives. It’s a vision of war almost as seamless as a round of Command & Conquer real time strategies.

“The concept of the future Navy control room that we are working with is that it will not actually be on-board the ship. We think this will work because we know that you can have pilots anywhere controlling drones that fly over conflict space. So why not have the officers somewhere safe, instead of on-board?”

Control rooms, or operations rooms, on warships are where all of the information that is continuously collected by the vessel’s equipment, including radar, sonar and cameras, is relayed to captains so that they can make tactical decisions. 

Unlike on-board control rooms where officers are usually seated, in case the ship is struck by a munition that would knock them off their feet, in an on-land control room officers could be allowed to walk freely around the room.

The AI in the process of development for the new control rooms could spot incoming threats to a warship and instantly prioritise them, so that commanders know which adversary vessels to take out first.

These technologies have the potential to transform warfare and greatly increase the situational awareness and efficiency of crews on board ships.”

Navy is seeing first-hand that data collection and analysis can go a long way in addressing lingering readiness problems, as the “Digital Twin” Office continues to roll out a set of pilot programs meant to introduce the service to the benefits of data science.

While its ultimate goal is to create a smarter data environment – much the way industry has used big data to better reach its customers, create efficiencies in production and more – the office’s first major action is to create awareness of its mission through a series of pilots that tackle readiness problems in the aviation and surface ship communities that have not been solved with traditional approaches.

The new organisation will assist systems commanders, type commanders, fleet commanders and others in identifying problems that can be solved using data analytics as a tool; facilitating a discussion between sailors and data scientists to create an approach for solving the problem; and then finding ways to apply that new approach to other parts of the Navy where applicable.

One pilot project looks at making surface ship maintenance availabilities more efficient, particularly as the Navy tries to embrace predictive maintenance, only fixing or replacing components as needed instead of on a fixed schedule. 

Supply officers today focus on reactively replacing parts that are consumed from their inventory, instead of proactively predicting what parts will be needed and when, which would be more useful in a predictive maintenance environment.

“We want to look at one of our top surface readiness degraders and say, can we be more predictive of the supply side there, reduce the supply chain time and get better accuracy around how we provide parts for those types of repairs?” 

“You might have to replace a blade on an engine, but you don’t necessarily order the bolts with that part. So can we create the relationships so that so whenever blade is replaced usually you have to have to also get this or that component – it’s kind of like e-shopping, if you bought this you may also want this – so can we create that kind of predictive supply system that would say, you just requested to replace the blade on the engine, you might also need these other parts because we find that there’s a high rate of these types of repairs with that as well. 

And then it’s over to the user. The machine and the data have presented some courses of action; the user can say you don’t need that, you already checked, or you didn’t check that, maybe you need to do that, let’s go see. And hopefully then you can kind of compress these maintenance cycles a little more and speed up the time.”

Another pilot optimises operations of the ships’ power plants through a “Digital Twin” effort, where a virtual replica of the power plant is created so simulations can be run to understand how it will perform and require maintenance under various conditions.

“We wanted the communities to show that this wasn’t just some tech kind of application, but when you combine the digital and the physical expertise together, you could get outcomes that you otherwise couldn’t get if you tried to solve it on your own. 

We wanted to expose the different aspects of the Navy to the tools and techniques, the language – a big part of this is, our users, our commanders have to be able to say, ‘We think there’s a data problem,’ instead of, ‘There’s a problem and let me go solve it in a traditional way.’ 

It’s a little bit different to say, ‘We think we have a data problem and we think we can get at this if only we had better access to data, or had the ability to analyze it differently, or had a different toolset.”

Office is addressing a major component of the Navy and Marine Corps readiness challenge: “non-mission capable, supply” aircraft that cannot fly because maintainers are awaiting the delivery of the spare parts needed to fix them. Both the maintainers and the supply community have separately tried to address this problem, which has only gotten worse in recent years due to insufficient funding. But the Office is coming at the problem from a new angle.

To begin the process, maintainers at the air station sat down with supply officers and data scientists to talk about the non-mission capable supply problem in a Digital Mission Space event.

“What we’ve seen at these Mission space centers is, in some cases the maintenance guys say,  we can’t solve this problem, it’s really really hard; the supply guys are like, well we can help with that; and the data science guys are like, okay, well what data do you both have and how might we pull it together? And can we automate the process? Can we make it more predictive instead of reactive?

During the Digital mission space center event, the maintenance and the supply experts were asked to think about what data they collect, through what processes, and to what end. Data shouldn’t be collected for data’s sake and they were asked to consider how data collection is actually contributing to their mission. 

The data scientists then helped them talk through what data could be shared and how, to assist each community in doing their jobs better, and to ultimately reduce the time it takes for an airplane to come into the depot, maintenance to begin, required parts to be identified, the right parts to arrive at the depot, and the airplane to be sent back out for operations.

Ultimately, the maintainers were given a new data set to work with and new processes to implement on a trial basis, and the mean time to repair aircraft is already down. The maintainers have also identified new policies, training areas and additions to their data environment that they think could benefit them going forward. 

In addition to getting aircraft back to mission-capable status faster, the pilot is also sparking the right kind of conversation about using data to tackle problems, with maintainers considering how to pull data from other communities and from open-source documents such as historical weather data, as well as questioning what new data they may want to collect going forward.

Navy is starting to understand the power of data analysis to help address tough problems. It’s a bit unclear now how the office will spend its time and manpower after the first pilots wrap up, though it will likely include tackling more project ideas that come in and “We’re assisting commands in holding their own Digital Mission space events to brainstorm solutions to problems. We’re going to take lessons learned from these first pilot programs and using them to change the entire data environment the Navy has built for itself.

“We want to solve a problem, we want to show the community there’s value here so we can start thinking of, well we also have this other problem that might be something. And then we could start to pull that back and say, once we start to get that predictive supply piece, do we have the right data environment in order to make that scalable outside of surface readiness to other pieces?

“And then start walking the organisations through that and where they need to partner, and how to have the right contracts in place and the right acquisition strategy to go after those types of data environments. And do we have the right skillsets inside our workforce to be able to manage the data once we start collecting it and analyzing it?”

“Part of it is about the technology and the introduction of new technology, but the really big return, that ultra-boost you get, is out of redesigning your processes and streamlining them, making them simpler and making them focus on what the user really needs. And that’s where you get a big productivity kick.

When AI is introduced, new attack vectors are introduced, such as deep learning spoofing and data spoofing. 

If the training data is known or manipulation of data is too predictable, adversaries can easily anticipate and predict actions and outcomes. 

Adversaries can spoof sensors and also the data collected by those sensors without needing to mess with the underlying model code. Put simply, adversaries do not need to know what is in the box to exploit the box. Spoofing Process Models Efforts Results in Compromise of Sources/Methods:

1. Importance and necessity of AI transparency is application-specific.
 
2. Trust must be met across algorithms, data, and outcomes.
 
3. Users must understand the mechanisms by which systems can be spoofed. 

4. Robust and resilient digital capability requires balancing development, operations, and security. 

5. Network risk management security ownership throughout and across organisations is critical.

6. Applying AI requires a skilled and educated workforce with domain expertise, technical training, and the appropriate tools.

7. Organisations must develop workforce expertise in digital data models 

8. Success for users in machine learning requires iteration, experimentation, and learning through early sub-optimal performance. 

9. Organisation must build the foundational digital capability to successfully apply AI technologies-- database management, information integration.

10. Gaining competitive advantage through information and analytics is an enterprise-wide endeavor from headquarters to the deployed warfighter.

​

We have provided a demonstration of how Digital Twin can benefit training processes was geared toward Marines within the aircraft armament systems and munition systems, and gave a glimpse of how VR applications can support in providing an enhanced experience to preparation of aircraft for combat missions.

Aircraft armament systems Marines are responsible for maintaining launch and release devices on aircraft. This means that when a pilot pulls the trigger, the devices successfully launch away from the aircraft toward the intended target. 

“It’s a way to build the readiness and experience level by leveraging advanced technologies. In the past, we received this level of experience because the weapon systems were in need of constant repair and maintenance. Now, our systems are more advanced, and it’s hard to practice difficult repairs.

“We can build our skill sets and proficiency faster by not having an aircraft break to perform the training. We could break one virtually at any time, any place. VR is a unique way to fully train while still maintaining our mission capable rate.”

In this demonstration, Marines experienced an immersive VR training scenario, put on a head-mounted display for VR application and used hand-held devices for training scenarios.

The immersive VR scenario allowed users to walk inside a hangar with a piece of munition positioned for maintenance. The user could look around the hangar, interact with the munition, pull up the technical order in a full-view mode or even watch a video of someone successfully installing that specific item on the munition. Essentially, the user could take apart and reassemble a munition from the barracks.

“In a controlled setting, VR allows for instant immersion into the field to help Marines understand the content better, faster.”

If VR is fully implemented into its training processes, Marines could have virtual hands-on experience much earlier in their careers, which could bridge the training-to-experience gap challenge the Service now faces.

The in-garrison mission may be different from the deployed mission. That gap can become noticeable if a Marine who has a home-station duty on a certain airframe or munition deploys and must work with unfamiliar equipment or in a joint environment. VR could be used as recurrent or just-in-time training to bolster the combat capabilities of users when they are deployed.

Demonstrations like these are designed to combat today’s challenges through innovation and collaboration among  top subject matter experts. It’s a way to increase combat capability and solve complex security issues by partnering with experienced  organisations to create platforms to house the application.

Redacted version of the report is made available to serve as a reminder about the importance of uncovering operational risks and the planning, briefing, executing and debriefing process. The Troops say that it’s a useful process for them to go through and identify what went wrong and to ask the most important questions of why did this happen.

It’s useful because it provides examples for training on their own equipment, so if one deployed unit had this issue, and then they go over with their teams in training sessions, it's a great tool to highlight potential recurring traps and do we have processes in place so we’re not going to run into this?

What Is Digital Twin Technology and Where Is it Really Going?

Digital twins—virtual replicas of a physical product, process, or system—bridge physical and digital worlds. Here is a guide to walk you through some of the most promising current and future use cases for digital twins.

For the past several years, the internet has been ringing with a new buzzword: digital twin. And, more recently, the term “digital twin of an organisation” has been added to the mix.

As digital twins grow in complexity and move from being digital representations of single items to models of systems of interconnected things, Marines are seeing the technology as an opportunity to connect people, processes, and things in a useful way, resulting in better operational outcomes. But is digital twin technology really here to stay? And where do its biggest opportunities lie for the future?

Here we look at what a digital twin really is, how to decipher true digital twins from the buzz, and where the technology is headed—especially as digital twins mature and expand in scope.

At its simplest, a digital twin is a virtual replica of a physical product, process, or system. Digital twins act as a bridge between physical and digital worlds by using sensors to collect real-time data about a physical item. This data is then used to create a digital duplicate of the item, allowing it to be understood, analyzed, manipulated, or optimised. Other terms used to describe digital twin technology over the years have included virtual prototyping, hybrid twin technology, virtual twin, and digital asset management.
 
Although digital twins have been around for several decades, it’s only been since the rapid rise of new network capabilities that they’ve become more widely considered as a tool of the future. Digital twins are getting attention because they also integrate things like artificial intelligence and machine learning to bring data, rules, and context together, enabling organisations to test new ideas, uncover problems before they happen, get new answers to new questions, and monitor items remotely.

Now that we’ve addressed the often elusive question, what is digital twin technology?, we can now explore how digital twin technology has been used to improve business processes. Digital twins were traditionally used to improve the performance of single assets, such as jet engines. 

In recent years, however, digital twins have become more sophisticated. Now, they connect not just one asset but rather systems of assets or even entire organisations. As digital twins bring together more and more assets and combine them with information about processes and people, their ability to help solve complex problems is also increasing.

A good example of where digital twins are being used at the organisational level is in military manoeuvres. By creating a digital twin of the mission space, Marines can get powerful, real-time insight into combat workflows. 

Using sensors to monitor troops and coordinate equipment, digital twins offer a better way of analyzing processes and alerting commanders at the right time when immediate action is needed. As a result, operational wait times can be reduced and workflow can be improved, decreasing operational costs and enhancing mission outcomes. 

The term digital twin is becoming a popular buzzword everywhere. Is it really here to stay? The consensus is a resounding yes. In fact, trends suggest that we’re on the verge of a digital twin explosion.

Where variation exists is in how digital twins are implemented. Digital twin technology can be used in new and mature ways, integrating sophisticated sensors, AI, and machine learning, to solve the biggest organisational challenges. In order to maximise their usefulness, digital twins need to be powered by high-performing databases that can pull together and process many data sets in real-time.

Where digital twins offer new and remarkable possibilities is at the organisational level in the built environment. Implementing digital twins offers the potential to create beneficial outcomes not only for administrators but also for the manoeuvre troops. In this way, digital twins can be used to take a troop-centric approach and then look at problems and context, and finally adding network systems and connected devices to try to solve big problems and create long-term value.

For organisations that already use advanced networks, digital twins are the next step along the digital journey. Digital twins can be used to improve efficiencies, optimise processes, detect problems before they occur, and innovate for the future. If your organisation is interested in producing better operational outcomes digital twins must be explored

Digital Twins can be used to check machine status at a glance, or as a visualisation tool in planning out installations. Perhaps most intriguing of all, VR can be used for remote expert support, giving the engineers at HQ the ability to “see” through the eyes of workers in remote locations. 

The advantages of VR have been demonstrated in the context of Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul MRO applications. For example, the ability to enter information via voice input in place of pen-and-paper checklists can streamline inspections and maintenance routines. 

Experienced workers equipped with VR devices can narrate routine maintenance and inspection tasks as they perform them, enabling companies to build up libraries of instructional materials over time with relatively little effort. 

Eliminating the need to switch back and forth between a task and a checklist for that task could also reduce the risk of error by keeping inspectors and maintenance technicians more focused. 

The ability to overlay a worker’s visual field with step-by-step instructions—including animations depicting the proper assembly or disassembly of parts—offers the potential to reduce lead times and error rates in MRO operations. 

Remote expert advice is an obvious application for VR in MRO. Field service often requires experts to travel to remote worksites, but the telepresence afforded by VR means a single expert can service multiple sites without ever having to leave the office.
 
It’s been said that there’s no substitute for a hands-on education, but whoever said that hadn’t see what VR can do. Many of the biggest players in manufacturing have begun to take advantage of what this unique technology can offer. 

Simulation for industrial robots is a valuable tool for robotic system integrators and robot programmers, allowing users to design robotic work cells and generate robot programs through offline programming. 

However, simulation requires accurate digital models of each piece of tooling and equipment in order to be useful. In most cases, users must export files from CAD tools, then import them into the simulation space. However, as any professional user knows, exporting, importing, and managing different file types and compatibilities can be a headache. 

VR plugins are designed to make tasks easier when programming for welding, drilling, machining, setting approach angles, and for importing many parts from CAD to simulation more rapidly. 

For example, when welding assembly is loaded into the simulation, knowing the exact position of welding joint start and end points can be challenging. Using the plugin, the user selects the surfaces, points and edges surrounding each weld. Next, the assembly automatically appears and the welding program is generated. This generated program can then be edited.

Next, the video illustrates how a common workflow for importing a CAD model into simulation involves saving the part in a different file format before it can be imported. With the plugin, the user can click a button in the toolbar, and the model will automatically load.

"Maintenance Troubleshooting Determine Effects of Malfunction/Discrepancy on Airworthiness of Aircraft"
Whenever a Mechanical Malfunction/Discrepancy is reported or comes to the attention of the technician, no matter how simple or complex, must determine appropriate time & location for the corrective action to be taken, identifying the cause of the discrepancy.

In one scenario, a landing gear position-indicating switch may fail because of its frequent usage, or failure may be premature, with the true cause of the failure being a voltage regulator or perhaps a leak in the hydraulic system allowing fluid to drip on the switch. It is important that the technician identify the true cause of the discrepancy when determining the corrective action to be taken.

Another example of troubleshooting is illustrated by considering the following scenario:  Aircraft system is experiencing low pressure, the fluid level is adequate, and no leakage is evident, but contamination is found in the system. According to the troubleshooting chart, the technician is to clean filters & flush the system. But this does not complete the troubleshooting process. Additionally, the source of the contamination must be determined, with corrective action to include elimination of the source.

Marine maintainers are always ready to employ and sustain combat ready suppression of enemy air defense and develop combat ready equipment to win our nation’s wars.  In order to stay combat ready, Maintenance Squadrons must find every nook, crack and cranny in mission critical equipment, both small and large parts.

Non-destructive inspections make it possible for Maintainers to discover small cracks on the surface as well as beneath the surface of the part.  To discover cracks on the surface, parts are dipped into a penetrant which seeps into the cracks causing them to glow when put under a black light.  Using penetrant chemicals is not the only way to expose a crack. Another way is to use a magnetic field to draw out cracks. 

A stationary magnetic particle unit is able to put a magnetic field into a part alternating its current, so cracks beneath the surface can be visible under a black-light.  After each piece is magnetized and demagnetized, it is measured to ensure the magnetic field is fully removed from the part. 

While performing all these tasks maintainers at times, wear full Mission Oriented Protective Posture gear during exercises “Wearing all the MOPP gear while doing our job is very difficult, but it is good practice,” Doing the job while fully suited up is very complicated, but was still very rewarding.. 

Maintainers continue to stay focused on their mission to win the current fight, be prepared to win the next fight and remain influential in generating lethal combat ready air power. 

In another example, maintainers are additional maintenance work to lengthening the life of the fighter jet low observable coating.  The leading edges of the aircraft need to be recoated, with a number of near-term modifications to keep the existing coating in good shape, 

“The gaps on an airplane are what raises the signature of an airplane, so by putting these coatings or these gap fillers into the airplane, you’re helping the low observability of the airplane. It reduces the amount of corners and things that are picked up by radar.” 

We’re experiencing low observable coating reversion problems. Basically, in high flow areas, what’s essentially happening is there’s a gradual deterioration of the coatings. If the LO coatings aren’t doing what we need them to do, then the platform loses its ability to do its primary mission, which is get behind enemy lines without detection.” 

Planners expected for the LO coating to gradually degrade, and it is doing so on pace with the predictions. “If you leave it out in the sun long enough, eventually that paint is going to crack, and if you don’t do anything to fix it when it cracks, eventually it’s going to start to peel off in chunks. 

In this case we knew it was going to occur about this time in the aircraft’s life, so we are starting to see the coatings on the airplane start to wrinkle and crack just like you would the paint.” 

A stealth jet’s inlets are the most critical part of the plane to recoat because, if the LO coating begins flaking off, it could be ingested by the engine, causing permanent damage.  

“When we do these fixes to the inlets, and we will continue this as we do the edges, we’re actually using a different compound than we had used on the production airplanes, which has significantly stronger, lasts much longer, so it’s going to be giving the squadron a longer time in the next interval where this might become a problem.” 

Different types of fighter jets have low observable technologies, the composition of the LO coatings are completely different and require separate application processes. 

“We would very much like to go towards, as best we can, the way the F-35 coats their airplanes for a number of reasons. single or more similar coating would lower material costs, enable the squadrons to have a set of maintainers to sustain the coating and simplify the inventory. 

“If we could get closer to something common, it would be a great savings. We’re trying to work that. Our engineers are very busy trying to see where that is possible.” 

Digital Twins are already telling us things that we need to look at before they become critical.

But even though 70 percent of the money the military spends on acquisition goes to "sustainment, few people talk about the issue. “There are rarely hearings on aircraft sustainment, but it's the reason we're able to go fight and win a war. There are amazing men and women that keep airplanes able to fly, but here's the thing: They're using technology that is decades old.”

We need to bring new tools to the military and in this age that means data mining. “We've brought in a lot of artificial intelligence experts to advise us on how to use AI to predict when planes are going to fail, and we're on of the first squadrons to have AI operational on its flying fleet.

Digital Twins are already doing amazing work, telling us things that we need to look at before they become critical. The data is there but it's not in a discoverable format that you can layer in machine learning on top of it. A lot of what we had to do was reverse engineering, so that that data can be exposed in an algorithm friendly way.”

Digital Twins are parsing the information generated by specific systems, like the landing gear, wheels, temperature sensors, and anything that is deemed mission-critical. These new tools have helped us find maintenance actions that we wouldn't have found through traditional processes.

The larger the fleet, the larger the time and money savings. This year’s test focused on large aircraft with small fleets, which are easier to handle. We are excited to bring AI scrutiny to all aircraft in the inventory.

 ”We're working very hard to make sure that our newest fighter is going to be able to do the same kind of smart maintenance approach. “The more that we can see into the future the better.”

Efforts to keep existing Digital Twin handbooks current would greatly enhance Troop confidence in improving impact of field-level missions. Keep track of all your tasks from your mobile device. Digital Twin technology lets you track responsive product support tasks from your mobile device to enable solutions for operational problems encountered by Marines for all types of equipment.

1. Product Support Schedule Monitor

Solution for complete scheduling, tracking of asset maintenance. You can establish scheduling for all types of maintenance. Part component consumption in the maintenance process is automatically tracked and recorded location tracking feature allows you to match technicians with tasks, ensuring rapid response to critical product support requests.

2. Service Success Track Platform

Save time, boost efficiency and increase customer satisfaction by taking your mission mobile. Mobile device can easily track technicians & assign work orders using high performance tools and track daily Job Site Events with unparalleled ease and efficiency. Streamlined workflows employ intuitive dashboards, calendars, and alerts to speed the maintenance process and ensure that you provide consistently outstanding service/solutions to your customers built into platform-wide mobilisation plans.

3. Streamlined Workflow Task System

Optimise control over administrative tasks, streamline workflows, by providing a straightforward, systematic way to process work orders from initial contact through completion and maximise efficiency with mobile solutions utilised by field-level units. Location-independent access ensures faster processing and the ability to run up-to-the-minute reports/solutions for all types of assets

4. Work Order Status Create/Update

Maintenance Mobile conveniently allows technicians in the field to create, update, and close work orders from a mobile device, with results in automatically updated status. Workers can use search bars to quickly and easily sort through and select work orders through a variety of fields. Other features include work order status editing to indicate priority of work order settings. Technicians can also view problem descriptions and access entry notes in a work order.

5. Access to Schedule Locations

Location-independent access to equipment ensures faster processing and up-to-the-minute reports. View detailed reports on inspection history including technician notes and findings. Inspection facilitates communication about product support scheduling and results with merge memos that can be sent via mobile device emailed using the notifications feature.

6. Enter Inspection details Into System

Inspection Mobile enhances the functionality of Inspection with the ability to access and enter inspection details from mobile device. Assigned inspections appear on device instantly, and completed results update the record automatically. Inspection Mobile even operates in field-level areas, scheduling links once the connection is reestablished.

7. Item Type Summary Access Screens

Fixed Assets reports provide assess tech as well as summary and detailed information about your assets. On-screen reports allow you to drill down to related screens. Report categories include Asset assess, Item Type Received, Make Ready, Work Order and Purchase Requisition.

8. Purchase Assign Control Schedules

Accurately coordinate purchase requisitions and work orders. Efficiently assign and schedule work orders Track pending work requests, alerts, and exceptions. Parts Control is the ideal solution for impact stocks transferred among multiple locations. You can track impact of parts transit as well as use location transfer of purchase issue.

9. Labour and Materials

Product Support Control Solution lets you monitor labour and materials used to complete work orders, quickly reconcile physical count of on-hand stock items, and automatically reorder parts as needed. You can also update pricing based on amounts paid on purchase orders.

10. Real-time Parts Stock Reports

Parts Control includes detailed reports that help you keep stock levels optimised to make better parts decisions. On-screen reports allow you to drill down to underlying information. For example, you can drill down from the Activity on Parts report to Transit Track, Item Type, or Location screen.
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