Crew involved in shaping aspects such as organisational architecture, the use and sharing of knowledge, process measurement and redesign and network support.
Crew involved in the checks from the hangar chief working on the different aircraft zones (landing gears, wings, engine, cabin, etc)
These staff were supported on a daily basis by the support planner, the materials coordinator and the commercial officer.
We have staked out territory in the hangar where the checks took place and all the departments involved in the upkeep of the hangar, for example, facilities supplying tools, equipment repair, etc.
This area oversees the running of the checks, including any work carried out in related workshops and the resourcing of the checks from a personnel point of view. The base maintenance department operates within a broader aircraft services structure of planning and commercial, engineering, quality, supply chain, personnel resources and networks.
Systems team manages overall development and implementation of the initiative. The steps in the improvement initiative were developed over time and were based on a review of current best practices in relation to ongoing work changes and time spent understanding and working with other continuous improvement initiatives in the enterprise.
NAVSEA also beefed up the Supervisor of Shipbuilding (SUPSHIP) at the yard and connected service providor with former project superintendents from the public yards who could help assist in the planning process.
The NAVSEA 07 submarine lifecycle management organization is also spending quite a bit of time helping the yard apply a contracting and planning model used on carrier RCOHs where each work item is broken up into the resources and cost needed, and the Navy and contractor agree to those along the way to reach a final contract that is as realistic as possible.
“All they had to do was ask, but we didn’t recognize until they started to do the work that there was a basic fundamental – like I said, blocking and tackling – that they lacked. So some of this was just, we didn’t realize they needed the help. It was never on our side any intention of not providing the help, and as soon as they said they needed the help in this particular area, we opened up everything we had.”
The are commonalities in the challenges yard has faced. The three primary challenges were reconstituting our submarine maintenance capabilities that had been idle for a decade (this work greatly differs from new construction), the need to grow additional and effectively balance engineering and production resources being split between maintenance availabilities that are being planned and executed concurrently, and the greater than anticipated hull-specific new growth work.
“We have addressed these issues and are making good progress on this set of availabilities
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The shipyard has demonstrated considerable learning and continuous improvement since reconstituting the submarine fleet support product line, and is committed to growing and building the workforce needed to support our submarine maintenance capabilities, and will continue to work with the Navy to keep pace with their current and forecasted volume of shipbuilding and maintenance needs.
The Navy’s ultimate vision based on recent lessons learned – would be that the yard always has one submarine in planning and one in execution, but never more than one in each phase, lined up heel to toe.
And the private yard might cease working on the Los Angeles-class SSNs and instead only do Virginia-class work. The Virginia subs are newer and the workforce is more familiar with the design since that’s what they’ve been building at the yard.
“We’re looking for a plan that makes everybody as successful as we can, so that’s certainly something we’re thinking about.”
The Navy and industry team used the time when there was not enough room in the yard to do inspections and get a good idea of the ship’s condition and the scope of work that will have to be done during the upcoming overhaul.
“We’ve at least learned the hard lessons and we’ve needed the time to get in and inspect the material condition of the boat, and we have taken lessons learned from the other overhauls.
So the work package we have coming in pretty complete, and we’re going to have some things that will allow us to get in and look at some of the things you couldn’t look at waterborne, some of the ballast tanks and things, but we’ve got a pretty detailed history on Los Angeles-class submarines, so we have a pretty good idea with a high degree of confidence what work is out there.”
A key lesson learned is that the work package should be pretty well defined before a contract is signed – something that’s pretty fundamental to ship repair, but hadn’t been executed well as SSN availabilities were delayed and moved around over and over.
Before, we said, let’s get it in there, let’s get started, and as we get growth we’ll manage it as we go. That’s always a strategy that doesn’t work well, in my book. You’re always going to have some growth work, but the better you can define the work that you have to do up front, the better you’re going to be, for a couple reasons.
One, you know what the cost and schedule are likely to be, you’re not going to be surprised. Two, if you really have a better idea of what the scope is looking like, then you know whether you’ve got the capacity to match that scope of work. Capacity applies to both the maintenance workforce to do the repairs and also the engineering workforce to handle the SUBSAFE requirements.
The bulk of the Navy’s problems in recent years was that its four public shipyards, tasked with maintaining nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers, did not have the capacity to keep up with demand
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The workforce across the yards dropped after sequestration and budget controls wracked the Navy maintenance budget, with many of the workers left at the yards having less experience than those who retired and weren’t replaced in recent years.
Beyond the sheer number of people doing the work, “basically, the two big yards, the carrier yards, haven’t been doing SSN maintenance. … They’ve been just focused on SSBN refueling.
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“And as we build more Virginia-class submarines, we’ll eventually start bringing more submarine work back in. And the fact that you don’t have SSBN refueling overhauls to work on means that, in terms of the priority at the naval shipyards, we shouldn’t see the SSNs taking a backseat.
Remember, a lot of the reason they took the backseat is because we just didn’t have the capacity at the naval shipyards to begin with. Now we have the workforce capacity to do all the work that’s assigned to us, and that’s going to reflect in on-time delivery across the board, whether it’s carrier work or SSNs.”
“The SSNs are going to be the ones that gain the most benefit of adding capacity at the shipyards.” SSN maintenance is wrapping up on time more and more as capacity at the public yards grows.
We are confident NAVSEA was in a good position on SSN maintenance because a whole set of improvements had been made in tandem in recent years: not only was the workforce now up to its goal, but an effort to create better business practices is underway and the first projects in a 20-year Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Plan (SIOP) program are already hitting the waterfront.
Navy has kicked off it’s Naval Sustainment System-Shipyards initiative to look at the business practices that support ship maintenance, modeled after a very successful NSS-Aviation effort that helped Naval Air Forces reach 80-percent readiness rates and higher in the fighter jet fleet.
And though the SIOP is a long-term plan that will require about $21 billion in funding over 20 years, an early project to replace a Los Angeles-class dry dock with a new one for modern Virginia-class subs – as well as a production facility on the waterfront that will move all shops and engineering spaces closer to the dry dock where repairs take place – will create a “dramatic improvement” in productivity there
.
“We’re trying to get out of the mentality of setting priorities within naval shipyards, because the experience has been, if you make something priority three or four, all that means is it’s going to be late.
We set priorities in a time when we just didn’t have capacity to work on everything. The Navy is changing that approach. On-time delivery of ships and submarines has been mission priority number-one for several years and we’ve grown the capacity at the naval shipyards now, we’ve done a number of things in the shipyards to improve productivity.
We’ve working through this Naval Sustainment Shipyard to bring in some help to go look at how we can transform the business processes at the naval shipyards. All the work we’ve done on SIOP means you can have the right numbers of workers, but if you really want to take that next step to being more productive and delivering everything on time, you’ve got to make the needed investments in the infrastructure to support that.
You can’t look at the Jobs individually, you have to go look at them in totality. You have to do all that work.op
Top 10 Condition Based Maintenance Questions Empowers Systems Engineers to Make Smart Decisions Increase System Availability and Readiness
1. What is CBM+?
CBM+ is the application/integration of appropriate processes ,technologies,and knowledge-based capabilities to improve reliability and maintenance effectiveness of DoD systems and components
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2. When is CBM+Used?
CBM+ensures timely,cost effective maintenance implementations in new acquisition programs across sustainment life cycle for fielded DoD weaponsystems., isused to support maintenance decision-making processes during system acquisition, sustainment, and operations
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3. Why do CBM+?
CBM+ isused in concert with other total lifecycle management tools to enhance materiel readiness and, improves maintenance decisions and integration of all aspects of life-cycle management processes.
4. Who is involved in CBM+?
CBM+ is focused on maintainer effectiveness and weapon system reliability to be implemented by Services, policymakers,p rogram managers ,system engineers, logisticians ,and maintenance managers.
5. How does CBM+ affect maintenance?
CBM+provides strategy and guidance for implementation of enabling technologies and procedures to improve business processes and maintenance performance to enable greater productivity, lower costs, better availability ,and enhanced reliability of materiel resources.
6. What are CBM Scorecard Factors? ,
CBM+ is condition based maintenance based on evidence of need provided by Reliability Centered Maintenance analysis and other enabling processes and technologies.
7. How do CBM processes give feedback?
CBM+ encourages systems engineering approach to collect data and enable analysis to allow for continuous development of maintenance processes and procedures to improve capabilities, practices and technologies
8. How does CMB inform policy?
Development of CBM+ across the Services involve collaborative effort activities include policy revision, Service plan review,project coordination, and sharing of information..teams established for short-term projects/studies,include current efforts in Reliability Centered Maintenance and business case analysis.
9. What are CBM+Goals?
The ultimate goal of CBM+ is to increase combat power, expressed in terms of operational and materiel availability and readiness ,throughout weapon systems lifecycle.
10. How are CBM+ efforts sustained?
CBM supports long term DoD goals of improving maintenance technologies and providing timely joint logistics support to meet warfighter needs by optimizing schedules of maintenance depot availabilties.