​Simulation is a practice  best incorporated throughout the design process, from concept to prototyping to pre-production development. Let’s review the historical use of simulation, new tools available to industrial designers and how to leverage simulation for reducing production costs and time-to-market.

Taking a prototype through the wind tunnel has always been a significant cost. The more iterations required, the more simulation testing, the higher the cost of development. 

Ideally, the more you can simulate the better off you will be, but how can we afford to do this? How does simulation interrupt the process? Is there a way to continue making progress while simulation is being done?

There are many new tools available to offer industrial designers the ability to simulate independently.

Professional simulation is still a necessity, but with these new tools designers can conduct some basic testing and analysis throughout the design process without having to stop what they are doing, and duplicate the resources required in order to do so.

Computational Fluid Dynamics offers testing in two categories: aerodynamics and heat transfer. The use for aerodynamics is pretty straightforward, limiting drag is one of many ways we can improve efficiency. Determining how the lines and curves can be tweaked to allow air to flow over and under aircraft helps designers by providing immediate, actionable feedback. 

The ability to make adjustments and test in real time allows designers to be more accurate earlier in the design process.. Another application for fluid dynamics testing is heat transfer. This is especially important in mechanical engineering. 

Simulation of the mechanical components allows you to properly test the impact that heat can have on the performance of particular parts. Say for example, plastic is being used to replace a traditionally steel part, but can only handle a certain amount of heat. Fluid dynamics analysis can identify points of failure or areas that have to be insulated to protect certain parts from high amounts of heat. Not only can it cause a part to fail, but it could also cause warping depending on the heat/material used, or be dangerous if the hot parts are too close to a worker.

Parts are stress-tested. As an example, bumpers and siding in the event of collision is a common application for this type of simulation. This is especially important as alternative materials are used where there is limited experience for specific parts. Often times components need to factor in both thermal stress as well as pressure loading due to normal use. Although engineers know the mathematical formulas to calculate key performance, incorporating simulation allows an algorithm to validate the design or identify points that require modification.

In recent years, the tools mentioned above have not only become available to designers and engineers, but have become affordable as well. There is no real replacement for crash-testing and wind tunnels, but a lot can be done in earlier phases of design to reduce the number of times these real-world simulations are required. 

Simulating early and often can help identify issues early, reducing the amount of rework that inevitably flows downstream. Similar to 3D rendering, these simulation tools improve the design and communication process, helping to reduce the number of iterations of the traditional tried and true methods. 

Our new Design workshop space will showcase the technology from start to finish. 

Every new technology comes with a learning curve, but we don’t want that to keep our customers from exploring what’s possible with our tools. 

Every manufacturer should be able to consider new and better ways to make things, and that’s why we’re opening a new workshop space to show our customers what generative design is, how they can use it and how it’s going to change the future of manufacturing. 

Generative design is our AI-based technology that uses design constraints like weight, strength and manufacturing method entered by the engineer to generate a set of solutions that fit within those constraints. Rather than coming up with a design and performing simulation studies to ensure it works, generative design takes the guesswork out of the process, letting designers and engineers use more of their creative potential because they already know the solutions are sound.
 
It’s an incredible tool to have at your fingertips, but it’s also a different approach that offers a new way to tackle design problems. That gave us another reason to create a place where people could come to kick the tires on the technology. 

The Field Lab is equipped with state-of-the art machinery so that customers can see how to design, prototype and make products in real time. Today’s manufacturers have a lot of options when it comes to making their parts—from tried-and-true CNC machines to the newest 3D printers on the market. 

Generative design allows a user to select their preferred manufacturing processes right from the beginning, so they can be sure that whichever solution they choose will be manufacturable with the equipment they have at their disposal. 

We are excited about the ability for our team to explore more design options from the beginning and iterate more quickly. “We do a lot of iteration when designing parts, but sometimes it’s not going very fast in the time cycle that we have. The product that we get at the end may not be exactly what we want as far as the product spec, but we get as close as we can. 

As our products get more complicated, we’re going to have to look at new methods and new tools, and that’s why we’re here at the Generative Design Field Lab. We’re ready to test new things like generative design and additive manufacturing because that’s how we’re going to become even better in our industry.” 

“To move manufacturing forward, we need to be thinking about the entire product life cycle, and that starts with the earliest stages of design. We can make things today that weren’t possible before because we are bringing solutions to the table by walking people through the whole process of design to make—is such an important part of us delivering on our mission and vision.”

With our continued Repair Shop process improvements, Marines have the  opportunity to better support the requirements of the Fleet without compromising current operational maintenance needs, while ensuring long term readiness of its surface force.

The process was not set up for success. We were not scheduling inspections at the right point We consistently did not executing the class maintenance plan and the tools commanders have to ensure the plan is executed consistently were not strong enough. 

So, we've had problems there. The expert capability to identify the easy stuff was not even there.” 

We are studying creation of a formalised aviation maintenance schoolhouse. Currently, each wing has its own processes. We have begun "breaking down and tracking every dime" in Engineering & Logistics budget. "We've never had it to that level of fidelity, but we're doing that now.” We have great maintainers, but how do you make sure they stay? And how do you make more of them?"

Implementation of certification process improvements has only been in place for a short time, but a huge payback has been realised.  Not only has the technical discipline of work and work certification during  availabilities been strengthened  the process “gaps” or problem areas are now visible, permitting development of corrective actions and implementation strategies.  

Event certification has led to improvement in how availability work packages are defined and improvement of the technical management of work in execution and more effective integration of testing.  

Establishing the certification process as the core foundation for maintenance availability planning and execution will guarantee a greater technical discipline in work planning; repair accomplishment and adherence to availability schedules, all of which are necessary to stabilise what has been a very dynamic maintenance planning and budgeting process.

With the depots unable to keep up with the demand for maintenance from aircraft carriers and submarines, those in the maintenance, engineering and fleet teams are looking for any solutions to help ease the backlog of work. And while better advance planning alone won’t solve the problem, the officials say, the situation cannot be resolved without improvements in planning.

To that end, a maintenance planning summit brought together carrier, submarine and surface ship maintenance planners to discuss best practices. One of the action items from the planning summit is to go back and look at, are we in some cases we don’t have the right balance between  condition-based maintenance and a more time-directed model.

Take example of  tanks, we have enough data to know that when this type of vehicle comes in for this type of availability and the age of the fleet component is this, We know statistically know we’re probably going to have to go work on X number of tanks,” 

“Today what we do is say, go inspect the tanks, and then go open them up and I find out you got to go work on them. That means we have to go get material and do the engineering work and we are starting the work late so we need to do the engineering, load those resources into the plan.

We are working hard to improve contracting process, getting requirements for work and materials to the depots farther in advance. “We are also attempting to improve our forecasting for material procurement. So we want to buy our supplies and work to forecast our material needs earlier and order earlier.

“So that will help, including developing a rotatable pool of equipment. So instead of removing a component like a electrical breaker, remove it and repair it – instead of doing that, just remove it and replace it with a new breaker or a refurbished breaker.”

We’re also paying closer attention to the resources available at the depots compared to the resources required to complete an availability on time. The office has implemented “weekly, if not daily reviews of maintenance availabilities with senior leadership in the effort to ensure we have the right resources applied when needed to execute these availabilities on time at the depots .

And where we don’t have these resources, we’ve been reaching out to our industry partners and contracting – whether it’s one of the lead maintenance providers topside– we’ve been reaching out to industry to shore up resources in yards during availabilities to deliver on time.”

A second key idea that came out of the planning summit was to create a faster feedback loop to inform technical foundation papers that inform each ship class’s maintenance plans.

“We need a tighter learning circle.”

The technical foundation directives are going to be updated – and completed and reviewed each year in coordination with the budget process. The carrier, submarine and surface ship planning organisations will also work together to ensure real-time information-sharing as they improve their own planning efforts, and they will meet regularly  to share lessons and measure progress.

Planning will never be 100-percent accurate, but that the data exists to make more informed decisions  we are making today. “We may not be able to predict everything, but current estimates are unacceptable.

DoD Reporting of Depot Maintenance Funding Allocations puts Goals for 50/50 Workload Balance between Private and DoD Work Sites at Risk”

Reporting of expenditures instead of obligations by DoD depots presents an inaccurate picture of depot maintenance allocations since the amounts differ. For the most part, the allocation percentages for budgeted funds represent obligation amounts obtained from DoD financial accounting systems. However, in reporting the amount of depot maintenance funds allocated to the private sector, some reporting organisations used expenditures rather than obligations as required  by official guidance. 

For example, several depots we visited reported their subcontracted depot-level maintenance work as expenditures rather than obligations. Reasons given by depot officials for reporting expenditures rather than obligations include :

Workload against obligated funds may not have been fully performed during the fiscal year, so the depot believed reporting expenditures was a better reflection of the actual workload.

Depot did not know obligations were to be reported instead of expenditures; and many work orders can be associated with a multiyear contract, so the depot believed that reporting expenditures would be a better representation of the costs associated with multiyear contracts for the fiscal year in question. 

Depots said producing types of information we suggested would require a massive undertaking and may be of limited value. We disagreed and, on the basis of the response, and assigned the matter for oversight consideration.

Because DoD has limited visibility over the allocation of private/public funds in some interservice agreements and direct sales agreements, inaccurate reporting of the depot maintenance workload allocation may result. 
Interservice workload agreements refer to work that is performed by one DoD component for another. Official guidance requires that the service departments establish measures to ensure correct accounting of interservice workloads; however the allocation of these funds may not always be accurately reported. We found instances where a service awarded depot maintenance work to another military service, which then contracted out a portion of that workload to the private sector. 

The military service awarding the work, as principal owner of the funds, inaccurately reported this as public workload because it had not inquired whether all the awarded work was performed at the DoD depot. 

While we were unable to fully evaluate the extent of inaccurate reporting associated with interservice agreements, until the service departments establish sufficient measures to accurately account for and report their distribution of depot maintenance workload reporting information will continue to be inaccurate.

Limited visibility over direct sales agreements is another reason why the depot maintenance workload allocation may be inaccurately reported. A direct sales agreement involves private vendors contracting back to DoD maintenance facility for labor to be performed by depot employees. 

We found that the reporting of the distribution of private/DoD sector workload for direct sales agreements may not be accurate. With a direct sales agreement, there is no requirement for the *private vendor to identify and break out the contract costs, such as materials and other factors of production, and allocate them to expenses performed by the private vendor or the DoD depot. 

We found the use of direct sales agreements may have resulted in an overstatement of private-sector funds, and understatement of DoD sector funds. In addition, we found similar instances where work performed by DoD sector under a direct sales agreement with a private vendor may have been misreported as being performed by the private sector.

 Although we were unable to fully evaluate the extent to which costs associated with these types of contract agreements were misreported, until private vendors break out direct sales agreement costs by the private and DoD sectors, DoD reporting of funding allocations to maintain a 50/50 workload between private and DoD job sites may remain inaccurate. 

Reporting agencies did not always provide accurate information for the Core Report because they do not have clear guidance on issues such as how to report additional depot workload performed that has not been identified as a core requirement, accurately capture inter-service workload, calculate shortfalls, and estimate cost of planned workload. 

Services organise and aggregate their capability information by categories of equipment and technologies known as work breakdown structure categories. The work breakdown structure category is a grouping of work associated with DoD’s weapon systems and equipment. 

DoD uses these categories to organise information on its various core capability requirements and workloads. The work breakdown structure can be expressed at any level of detail down to the lowest-level part, such as a bolt.
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Our experienced staff can help you with the logistics of any project.  We can assist in planning your repair, what may be needed and make sure that the process goes smoothly.  We aim to make sure you aren't left stranded without parts or the tools needed to complete a job once started. 

We have a professional shop available to any unit that wants to do their own work and save money doing it.  Our rates are much less than the independent shops and we offer professional grade tools.  

Our Shop has online access to the same repair manuals that the pros use, updated constantly and available at modern workstations. An important facet of our business model is that customers can blend their jobs to include multiple pricing models for any one job – providing flexibility and saving money in the process.

The stability of our model should allow us to attract some of the best in the industry, and as a result, more senior staff will be available. One of our biggest differences is that we are a top-notch technical repair facility.  We know field units have to have the ability to bring their own parts into theatre  and to do their own repairs.  We provide education, mechanical assistance, facility and tools.

Without context, work orders can be a difficult thing to deal with. On the other hand, smart work order tracking—which will explain the what’s and how’s of the most common problems—can yield a number of benefits. 

First, it can lead to lower costs. Second, it can produce a more productive workforce. In the delicate balancing act of facilities administration, these two things are very important goals. To help you achieve them, here are the most important questions to help you ensure that your work order system is efficient.

What’s Ordered Most Often? Look at what problems pop up the most often. Is it an overflowing tank? Faulty electrical fixtures? A stuck  button? It may be tempting to use a quick and temporary fix for these problems  to save time and money. However, if there’s a problem that’s recurring, it will most likely cost you less in the long run to order an extensive inspection of the problem area. Those quick fixes may seem cheap now, but repeat them enough times and they can be a big expense overall.

How Long Does It Take to Fix It? Tracking the time needed to complete each order can help you improve how you use your maintenance team. For example, let’s say there’s an elevator malfunctioning on a ship. If you track how long it takes a maintenance worker to fix it, you can better plan how you’ll dispatch the team the next time the issue occurs. This will be especially key for large depots, where multiple work orders are generated each day.

How Often Is It Ordered? If you have multiple units complaining about the same item in the office, that may be a sign that you need to purchase new assets. If the desk chairs on the Titanic keep breaking, it may be time to look at a brand of chairs that are more sturdy. If you receive multiple complaints about ALIS  not working on the F-35, that may be a sign to order new systems. 

While it’s understandable that you want to get the most value out of your assets, once they’ve outlived their usefulness, they can be a roadblock for productivity, and therefore have a negative impact on the field unit bottom line.

How Quickly Is the Order Filled? Another important part of tracking work orders is knowing how much time passes between the order’s submission and its completion. This will vary according to different factors, including the problem’s complexity, the field units size, the methods used for generating your work orders, etc. Still, regardless of your field unit’s specific situation, you want to make sure that you streamline the process as much as possible so that interruptions to the staff’s workday do not continue longer than they have to.

How Does Communication Flow? For large field units  that don’t have an efficient work order system, it can be easy for communication about a problem to break down or get mixed up. How are your work orders submitted and processed? Is information passed via electonics, paper, or word of mouth? If a worker submits an order, do they know when the order has been processed?

Also how does the maintenance team know how to prioritise each order?  In a shop where a worker’s wondering why the request they submitted months ago hasn’t been answered and your maintenance teams are unhappy because they just got an urgent order when they already had a busy day ahead of them, and both are calling you to complain...well, that’s not good situation for anyone involved.


1. We teach and assist units that are willing to “turn the wrench” so that they can experience significant repair savings – providing as much or as little assistance as the customer needs.

2. We provide our Repair Shops service today in an large hangar bay facility to allow our customers to significantly reduce the costs of repair

3. We help field units understand more about their vehicle through instructional classes, and empowering them to control vehicle maintenance costs.

4. We include in our model vehicle lift, tools, pneumatic air tools, workbench, mats, and lights.  Shop supplies are included in the price.  

5. Vehicle fluids e.g., oil, brake fluid, radiator fluid and parts are marked up on average over cost.  

6. Mechanic assistance in diagnosing the vehicle provides education and guidance  on how to repair the item, and assist units in making the repair as needed.

7.  We make sure facilities are always open generating more availability, and less staff required.  

8. We take advantage of technology to optimise our scheduling with customers using Shop Automation system 

9. We track the average amount of time it takes a customer to repair a vehicle

10. We are always on call to fix emergency unplanned repairs encountered by most  field units living from appropriation to appropriation.   

​The Logistics Team, a sub-team within Current Readiness, oversees force-wide maintenance/supply processes to ensure production of prescribed levels of equipment “ready for tasking” at reduced product-line costs. This team focuses on the efficiency/effectiveness of all integrated logistics support processes, including material requirements forecasting, scheduling, contracting, purchasing, buying & inventory administration, distribution, repair induction, planning, diagnostics, repair & quality assurance.The Integrated Logistics Support System Tool assessment tools assist in identifying root causes of readiness cost degradation, enabling logistics assessment triage process platform teams enter into briefing cycles. 

The tool uses a historical baseline to identify components that perform outside established parameters, providing early indications of potential degradation before they affect readiness or costs and also provides more than 100 top-level metrics with detailed transactional data to assist in trend assessments. The logistics assessment process standardises the way teams identify readiness costs & degradation via assessment capabilities, standardised process models, and improved access to aggregated information. 

At the end of logistics assessments, teams work on initiatives and courses of action to reduce the ready-for-tasking gaps, as well as operations & sustainment costs.The Fleet Readiness Centers’ Aviation Rapid Action Team comprises engineering, maintenance &logistics experts who quickly develop, test, and deploy solutions to maintenance problems. They identify potential opportunities, improve or create repair capabilities, certify procedures, train technicians .helping sites establish their own permanent capability/support 

Co-located maintenance alters the traditional depot-level maintenance repair process by moving the intermediate and depot maintenance capabilities closer to each other. Under this new process, Navy personnel work at the depot site & perform intermediate repairs on items inducted into the depot repair cycle. When finished, they hand the items over to civilian artisans who perform the remaining depot repairs. This process lowers the charges for aviation depot-level repairable items. 


Similar initiatives are being applied to all platforms. Root cause assessments are performed in four areas–maintenance practices, maintenance planning, repair capability & contract strategies–with an eye on depot-level repairable & consumable cost drivers that present potential opportunities to reduce costs per flying hour. In the process, actual failure rates are compared to current maintenance plans, opportunities to turn high-cost consumables into repairables are investigated & additional repair capabilities are established as needed. 

Event-based maintenance, which requires fewer preventive maintenance hours at the squadron level, will result in operations and sustainment cost reductions. A significant number of initiatives have reduced life cycle costs, such as repairing several hundred parts that otherwise would have been discarded. Another initiative was the application of a phased strategy to programme performance-based logistics support efforts. This strategy involves different levels of supplier maturity, while setting desired levels of performance for industry in key areas: technical assistance & engineering investigation turnaround times, supply response time, etc.. 

The programme is maturing its intermediate & depot-level maintenance capabilities by leading depot establishment support, providing equipment, bills of material, drawings, lending training &technical assistance. In addition, the aircraft itself is undergoing improvements through component changes that will avoid life-cycle costs 

Current budget planning provides funding for operating maintenance & acquisition accounts. Program life cycle costs have tended to exceed expectations during execution. Efforts to account for shortfalls in acquiring systems are often balanced with affordability goals in operation & support of the new & legacy systems. 

Historical trends and forecasts suggest that the estimated operations & sustainment planning figures would require reduction in costs to sustain fleet operations as currently envisioned. Naval Aviation is making “should cost” a priority to understand and manage affordability, while balancing risk and meeting operational requirements. Reducing the overall cost per flying hour is a key component of reducing operations & sustainment costs. Several initiatives are underway to assist in achieving these goals

The crew chief uses existing maintenance instructions to verify the fault and manually complete a record to report the aircraft is grounded and record the fault e.g., intermediate tail rotor gearbox input seal leaking. The crew chief then notifies maintenance of the fault. Since the repair of the gearbox is above the capability of O-level maintenance, the aircraft must be evacuated to the I-level for repair. In this scenario, internal coordination has taken place between the O-level and I-level to have the gearbox repaired and returned to the user..

The crew chief then follows maintenance instructions in existing manuals to remove the unserviceable gearbox from the aircraft. He also completes the aircraft inspection and maintenance record, entering the fault description and the aircraft hours, time, date, etc. He completes the related maintenance actions record to note each related maintenance action. For example, “removed number 4 and 5 tail rotor drive shaft retaining clamps,” “removed number 4 and 5 tail rotor drive shafts,” and “removed intermediate tail rotor gearbox retaining nuts and removed intermediate gearbox.” 

Before forwarding the unserviceable gearbox to intermediate maintenance, the crew chief must complete a component removal and repair and overhaul record for the gearbox. This form contains historical usage data for the component; it is forwarded to I-level maintenance facility with the component. The crew chief also updates the aircraft component historical record by completing information about the gearbox’s removal. An unserviceable/repairable tag is completed, signed by a technical inspector, and attached to the unserviceable gearbox. 

The transfer of the gearbox from the O-level to the I-level is facilitated by the organizational unit completing a maintenance request form, with all pertinent component information and a description of the fault, and entries in the maintenance request register. The gearbox is then transported to the I-level facility along with all documentation. This scenario continues in I-level maintenance section for repair of the gearbox.

The crew chief is notified once the replacement gearbox is received by the unit’s tech supply. For installation, the crew chief inspects the replacement intermediate gearbox for condition and the inclusion of a properly completed component removal and repair/overhaul record. He then installs the gearbox, following maintenance instructions in technical manuals, and completes the related maintenance actions record installed gearbox and torqued, installed 4 and 5 tail rotor drive shafts, etc. He also completes the aircraft inspection and maintenance record, indicating the serial number of the new gearbox. 

Next, using the component removal and repair/overhaul record for the replacement gearbox, the crew chief completes the required usage entries from this record and enters the data in the aircraft component historical record. He also completes the oil analysis log with the due date of the new intermediate gearbox sample.
Once all maintenance entries are signed off and cleared by the technical inspector, the crew chief or technical inspector enters the requirement for a maintenance test flight for the replacement of the intermediate tail rotor gearbox on the aircraft status information record. 

A maintenance test pilot conducts the test flight in accordance with established procedures. Upon successful completion of the maintenance test flight, the test pilot signs the aircraft status information record and the aircraft is returned to an airworthy or ready condition.

Intermediate maintenance is the maintenance level between the most extensive maintenance — depot, and the least extensive but usually the most common organizational. intermediate-level maintenance defined as that maintenance that is the responsibility of and performed by designated maintenance activities for direct support of using organizations. Its phases normally consist of: calibration, repair, or replacement of damaged or unserviceable parts, components, or assemblies; the emergency manufacture of non-available parts; and providing technical assistance to using organizations. 

The Services generally require varying degrees of maintenance capability at different locations. Specifically, maintenance capability at any particular level depends upon mission requirements, force protection, economics of repair, transportation limitations, component reliability, workload agreements, facility requirements, frequency of tasks, and special training required. These requirements exist as Service doctrine that aligns maintenance support structure with the Services' strategic capabilities and objectives. 

Organisational maintenance is the responsibility of and performed by a using organisation on its assigned equipment. Its phases normally consist of inspecting, servicing, lubricating, and adjusting, as well as the replacing of parts, minor assemblies, and subassemblies. Of note is that organizational-level maintenance describes work performed in the field, on the flightline, or at the equipment site, and is not only accomplished by maintenance personnel, but also by equipment operators. 

After system fielding, it may be necessary to alter or change the configuration based on emerging operational requirements, improved technology, or to improve life cycle cost.  All changes which affect Form, Fit or Function must be managed via the alteration process.  Alterations and changes are reviewed with respect to their impact on safety, operational readiness, life cycle cost and supportability to the system and thoroughly assessed.  
Each of the support elements and related disciplines are analyzed to determine the impact of the proposed alteration on the system.  All impacts to the support structure i.e., manpower, training, technical manuals, spare parts, etc. are carefully assessed, planned for, and executed.  

Maintenance Planning is the foundation of effective life cycle planning.  The maintenance plan may include the technical manual, spare parts, drawings, and other data required to ensure a cost effective system, minimized life cycle cost, and reliability/readiness parameters.  Maintenance Planners will use the process as a guide for developing the maintenance plan.  The PM has the responsibility for establishing the maintenance plan.  

Maintenance planning is an iterative process to explore alternatives and to establish concepts and plans for maintaining a system throughout its life cycle and provides the basis for development of all other logistics support requirements.  This process starts with the development of a maintenance concept which is published in requirements documents in very broad terms.  As an acquisition program proceeds through the various acquisition phases, maintenance planning will become more defined.  Ultimately individual maintenance actions are assigned to appropriate levels of maintenance.  

Maintenance planning is performed to ensure: Development of the minimum set of maintenance requirements necessary to operate the equipment at its assigned readiness threshold.   Assignment of maintenance tasks to the appropriate level where they are accomplished most efficiently and effectively.  Development of a maintenance concept and detailed maintenance planning which will provide the information necessary to support logistics planning and management decisions. 

For all expeditionary acquisitions, maintenance planning will begin at the initiation of the program.  As the system design progresses, maintenance plans are refined into a maintenance concept based on the results of specific tasks within the supportability process.  These tasks include Supportability Analyses, Level of Repair Analysis Failure Modes, Effects Analysis,  and warranty provisions.  The process will be used as a guide to developing the maintenance plan.  Complexity and cost of the system, preventive and corrective maintenance tasks, and the skills and numbers of personnel required and available are some of the areas analyzed to refine the maintenance plan

Provide input to outline the initial maintenance concept, which is developed through review of historical, comparative analysis, cost data, and unique support and/or employment requirements. Provide technical guidance and/or support to ensure that individual maintenance concepts and plans are formulated in accordance with established guidance. 

Conduct evaluation of multiple sources of user feedback to determine readiness and maintenance circumstances.  The result of the assessment may result in changes to the maintenance tasks, revision to technical manual information, or operator training changes. 

A critical task in the maintenance planning process is identifying those preventive maintenance checks and services that maintain equipment at specified readiness goals.  Must have standardised method for planning, scheduling, and accomplishing preventive maintenance by the expeditionary force.  

All expeditionary acquisitions will use Reliability-Centered Maintenance methodologies to develop requirements for a system and each system will be covered by a Maintenance Index Page.  The goal is to identify the minimum preventive maintenance procedures required to maintain equipment in a fully operable condition within specifications.  

As part of the maintenance planning process, each support worthy system procured for the expeditionary forces will undergo an analysis to establish preventive maintenance requirements.  Supply support consists of all management actions, procedures, and techniques used in acquiring, cataloging, receiving, storing, transferring, issuing, and disposing of equipment, and spares and/or repair parts.  

The aim for all expeditionary programs is to have adequate organic supply support to achieve system readiness objectives available at the proper echelons of supply and maintenance. This support, including spare and/or repair parts and publications, are continued throughout the system's life cycle.  When organic support cannot be put in place prior initial capability interim supply support strategies will be employed.  There are three primary areas that an acquisition supply support program should address:  provisioning, cataloging, and replenishment.   
 Provisioning is the process of determining which materiel and how much of that materiel is necessary to support and maintain a system or equipment for all levels of maintenance--   organisational, intermediate, and depot for an initial period, not to exceed two years.  Provisioning must include the identification, selection, and acquisition of initial support items required for maintenance and provides instructions to ensure these items are prepositioned in the supply system and/or maintenance echelons before new systems are placed in service.  The assignment and verification of supply management codes such as Source, Maintenance, and Recoverability codes, criticality classification, item management, and others occur during the provisioning process and must be consistent with other supportability analysis processes. 

 The replenishment phase of supply support is the means by which spares are positioned and sustained in service supply chains.  This process is a continuous updating or refinement of the support requirements identified prior to system fielding.  These requirements, which were based on anticipated failure rates, logistics delay times and other related factors during provisioning, must be recomputed based on actual values measured during the fielding/deployment phase.  

Each system may have unique post production support problems, many of which were not anticipated.  These problems may include obsolete parts, inadequate sources of supply for the spare and/or repair parts, and changes in technology.  Issues are mitigated as part of the replenishment process.  

Expeditionary programs shall ensure that each program submits product support sheets to identify spares funding requirements.  At program initiation, supply support will plan for and execute program provisioning, cataloging and replenishment requirements.   As programs begin to install new equipment, spares budgets will be utilized to “buy out” spares to support the new equipment installations.  Expeditionary programs will use the standard outfitting process.  

1. Plan, coordinate, monitor, evaluate and adjust reset actions to support ground equipment reset

 2. Provide total life cycle management governance of ground equipment being reset

 3. Identify resource requirements to facilitate reset planning and execution

 4. Integrate logistics plans, policies, and strategic mobility for ground equipment

5. Integrate installation capabilities in support of ground equipment reset actions

 6. Establish specific Facilities Sustainment, Restoration, Modernization programs for ground equipment reset requirements

7. Identify budgetary resources to facilitate project planning and execution

8. Provide logistics intelligence regarding ground equipment reset to senior leadership

 9. Identify operational requirements to facilitate reset and reconstitution planning and execution

10. Identify and prioritize all critical supply and equipment shortfalls 

11. Manage resource programming and budgeting to support reset and reconstitution

 12. Review and provide assessment of the effectiveness and efficiency of reset programs as they relate to resourcing

 13. Develop ground equipment requirements and concepts related to reset and reconstitution

 14. Identify equipment purchased through the Urgent Needs Statement/Urgent Universal Needs 

 15. Identify, consolidate obsolete equipment requiring reset to provide interim capabilities until procurement actions can be accomplished

16. Identify obsolete equipment not requiring reset, in order to provide for appropriate disposition

 17. Determine the final destination of unique equipment being retrograded, redeployed, or redistributed

 18. Main effort for the execution of the reset of ground equipment returning from combat

 19. Perform depot level maintenance and Manage the issue of reset ground equipment 

 20. Provide assistance in the performance of field level maintenance for equipment returned directly to home stations

21. Perform inventory management functions for ground equipment in support of reset and reconstitution

22. Publish and maintain a depot maintenance plan incorporating capacity from defense depots, commercial outsourcing, etc.

23. Manage the receipt, reset, and distribution of Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement authority equipment

 24. Develop and implement an equipment rotation program to support sustained operations

 25. Ensure Consolidated Issue Facilities capture accurate cost data and reorder Individual Combat Equipment to replace combat damaged equipment

26. Execute marking of all ground equipment service plans entered into maintenance cycles

 27. Forecast projected maintenance depot workloads and provide forecast to Supporting Establishment

 28. Manage and execute reconstitution of prepositioning programs

 29. Facilitate the retrograde of ground equipment to maintenance facilities within and outside of theater

 30. Arrange all Common User Land Transportation  in-theater to move equipment transferred to their custody to applicable Aerial Ports of Debarkation and Surface Ports of Debarkation

 31. Report and track strategic movement of equipment within and outside of theater

 32. Utilize the Time Phased Force and Deployment Data process when redeploying equipment

 33. Identify resource requirements to facilitate reset planning and execution

 34. Coordinate Life Cycle Management plans for ground equipment returning from combat operations 

 35. Provide support in order to provide In-Transit Visibility of ground combat equipment being reset and distributed for reconstitution

 36. Identify equipment and their locations to reset equipment returning from combat

 37. Determine and identify equipment reset strategies for each Authorized Material Control Number

 38. Execute procurement actions on ground equipment that has been determined uneconomical to repair

 39. Identify equipment and secondary reparables requiring marking during reset and reconstitution

40. Update equipment delivery schedules resulting from new procurements

 41. Implement reset and reconstitution at operational and tactical levels 

42. Conduct maintenance actions on equipment returning from combat operations using appropriate reset funding.

 43. Provide adequate reset funding for stock replenishment for returning equipment 

44. Ensure required capabilities remain in theater for mission accomplishment

45. Maintain operational control of the retrograde and redeployment process 

 46. Validate force requirements and equipment density lists to support operations 

 47. Assist and facilitate command and control of retrograde and redeployment 

 48. Manage redistribution transit of ground equipment assets in support of transition.

 49. Ensure adequate warehousing/surge maintenance capabilities
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50. Provide for adequate contracting support to support reset

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?