Figure 1.1: The components of availability performance (IEC 2011).
Over the last decade, the focus of the Swedish defence forces has shifted from buying hardware from manufacturers, to buying availability from service providers (Försvarsmakten 2006). Thus the focus of the defence industry has shifted from delivering hardware to keeping the maintained equipment operationally available. The performance of the maintenance support organization is, however, only one of the three components that make up availability performance. Availability performance consists of maintainability performance, reliability performance and maintenance support performance, as illustrated in Figure 1.1.
IEC (2011) has defined the performance of the different components as follows:
This section will discuss the outsourcing of maintenance support in Section 1.1.1. The approach of contracting maintenance support providers by availability performance is popular among military customers, and is looked at in Section 1.1.2. The nature of military operations creates some special demands on civilian contractors, which are identified in Section 1.1.3. Finally, the prevalence of information and communication technology has created opportunities for remote maintenance support, which is dealt with in Section 1.1.4.
There are a number of reasons for why a client organization may want to outsource maintenance. One reason could be recurring maintenance tasks that require the skill of specialist competence which is readily available in the market on a competitive basis. Outsourcing maintenance is in some cases cheaper than recruiting staff, and can also be available on short notice. In general, maintenance activities for which the client organization has neither a strategic need nor a special capability are prime candidates to be outsourced (Tsang 2002).
The purpose of providing a maintenance support service is to enable the client organization to achieve its objectives. The specific responsibilities of a third-party service provider varies depending on the type of maintenance support contract. Some example responsibilities likely to be included in performance-based maintenance contracts are:
Complex equipment, for example ships, is built by a number of different contractors and subcontractors which will also be involved in the maintenance and manufacturing of spares for the equipment during its life cycle. Setting up a maintenance support organization involving multiple suppliers, and frequently multiple customers using the same equipment, is facilitated by information and communication technologies. However, technical support for information communication is insufficient to develop a cooperative working situation that involves many self-motivated customers and suppliers sharing a common goal. The created synergies is an emergent property of the system as a whole, and is not expected to be obtained as a simple sum of its components (B. Iung 2003).
Under a Performance-Based Logistics (PBL) strategy, the customer buys performance, such as operational availability, mission readiness and operational reliability, rather than buying a specified collection of resources or services. In the area of maintenance, PBL contracts are also known an performance-specified maintenance contracts. These contracts specify the desired performance using key performance indicators, such as failure rates, availability, response times. It requires the contractor to monitor the equipment, decide on priorities, then organize and implement the work.
PBL-contracts are typically used to award a single contractor a comprehensive range of maintenance services. To meet the required performance outputs, the support provider will have to continuously make refinements and adjustments to the maintenance support solution. By allowing flexibility in achieving the desired outputs and providing performance-linked incentives, this approach encourages the support provider to invest in new technology and innovation to seek continuous improvement (Tsang 2002). This type of contracting is gaining popularity in the Swedish public sector, including the defense forces (Försvarsmakten 2006). The same trend appears to hold true for other countries as well, which has prompted some research into the area, for example optimizing logistic resources and spares (Nowicki et al. 2008).
According to sources cited by Nowicki et al. (2008), the overall availability of the F/A-18E/F, which has components that incorporate PBL, has been 85% compared to the older F/A-18C/D which is supported under traditional maintenance practices and achieved only 73% availability, which is an anecdote indicating the potential of PBL contracting. The maintenance outsourcing experience of some Australian government agencies and state-owned organizations shows a set of features that has allowed more value to be obtained from this type of contract (Tsang 2002):
Maintenance support services provided by industrial partners are already in use within military aviation (FMV 2009), but it is only relatively recently that the same types of solutions have been discussed for ground-based equipment in the Swedish armed forces. One reason for this is the fact that airborne equipment frequently return to a location outside of any conflict area, where civilian resources can operate safely and relatively unconstrained. With ever increasing equipment complexity and the advent of inexpensive and available information and communication technologies, maintenance support services for ground-based equipment are becoming more and more relevant.
Information from military activities that includes any data on, for example locations, ongoing/planned activities or status of specific equipment, will be highly classified. Also, fielded military systems may require radio silence and are unlikely to have a physical connection to a communications network. For these reasons, maintenance related information may be incomplete, delayed and/or limited by bandwidth. Thus there is a need for simulation techniques for determining the best trade-off between information-flow restrictions and achievable maintenance support performance.
Equipment that remains unused in a garage will require little maintenance and will have great availability. On the other hand, in the event of conflict, equipment may be heavily used in circumstances where it is hard to maintain. Thus, the delivered performance must be measured in relation to usage. Care must also be taken to prevent a situation where the civilian provider has a vested interest in the starting or continuation of conflicts for economic gains (Perlo-Freeman and Sköns 2008).
An additional issue with military customers is that the presence of civilian organizations and staff in conflict areas, where a military customer might operate, is problematic. International humanitarian law is unclear regarding its application to civilian contractors in war zones (Perlo-Freeman and Sköns 2008). This can be mitigated using remote maintenance techniques, as discussed in Section 1.1.4.
Finally, involvement of civilians in military operations can also generate military concerns. For example, civilians may decide to leave their job, companies can go bankrupt, and profit-optimizing business practices such as “just in time” may be inappropriate in a safety critical environment. A workaround for this is to ensure that the customer has access to the required information and knowledge to change or replace the contractor while minimizing risk to any ongoing operations.
The idea behind the remote maintenance concept is that it is easier to transfer information to and from specialists, than it is to move specialists to and from physical locations. Equipment configuration, status and monitoring data can be provided to specialists for diagnosis or analysis, and the specialists knowledge and decisions can be sent back to local maintenance staff or the equipment operator. This is facilitated by modern information and communication tools, which makes it technically feasible to transfer information and knowledge to different actors.
In the industrial domain, remote maintenance provides a number of services (B. Iung 2003):
These are all services with great potential for application in maintenance support services for military customers as well. A challenging problem is to assist the equipment operators decision-making process, typically to prevent degradation of the system by incorrect maintenance or, for example, how to keep the equipment functional in a degraded state. An evolution from remote maintenance to e-maintenance takes place when the assistance to the operator is a result of collaboration between maintenance processes and experts (B. Iung 2003).
This section identifies maintenance support performance as one of the three components of availability performance, besides reliability- and maintainability performance. The conditions under which it makes sense to outsource the maintenance support to third-party providers were then discussed. Typically this is the case when it is more cost-effective to buy required maintenance expertise than trying to keep the required staff in-house. It has become popular with defense departments and public institutions to buy third-party maintenance support for maintenance of acquired equipment. Performance-outcomes are then bought, under so called performance-based logistics contracts. Military customers raises special difficulties, involving information security concerns and possible conflicts of interest. Suggested solutions to the identified issues were also presented, and remote maintenance was identified as a facilitating strategy for the maintenance of ground-based military systems.