A DIFFERENT BUSINESS APPROACH FOR THE NAVY MAINTENANCE PROCESS

The realization that there will be fewer assets and reduced budgets in the 1990's coupled with the continuing increase of ship maintenance costs throughout the 1980's requires a change in the technical and business strategies in which Navy maintenance is executed. Application of existing diagnostics and communications technology will provide our national assets with greater self-sufficiency as well as bringing real performance data shoreside to make more efficient business-related decisions in the way intermediate and depot-level work requirements are brokered. Integration of embedded training, as well as documentation and provisioning data, with the condition assessment technology shipboard will improve the ship as well as significantly reduce in size the structure of the shoreside community required to support our national assets. Several initiatives of varying complexity have been prototyped in fiscal year 1990 with test and evaluation in fiscal year 1991. These initial efforts provide a springboard to a strategy which integrates information from static and dynamic mechanical systems with damage control and combat systems into out existing ships by fiscal year 1995. Bringing this performance knowledge to the bridge will provide in-service hulls a capability beyond what was ever expected and the corporate knowledge required to properly design the ship of 201 0. The paper discusses the authors' vision of these evolutionary business concepts utilizing the application of today's technology.