A Smart Army Deserves Smart Maintenance

The United States Army employs over 300,000 fielded training aids, devices, simulators, and simulations (TADSS) worldwide. The comprehensive suite encompasses live fire ranges and sophisticated instrumentation systems (IS) across various Army training facilities.

 

At the heart of sustaining and optimizing this diverse infrastructure lies the concept of Smart Maintenance. By applying Smart Maintenance processes, the Army gains the capability to uphold constant operational awareness within the training and maintenance ecosystem.

 

This proactive approach equips decision-makers with real-time insights, guiding them to allocate critical resources where and when needed, and as a result, system availability increases while operational costs decrease.

 

These TADSS serve as essential tools supporting a spectrum of training activities, including battle drills, warrior tasks, proficiency in military occupational specialties and marksmanship, and the development of effective command and leadership skills. The integration of Smart Maintenance ensures that these training aids are not only effective but also efficiently managed.

 

What is Smart Maintenance:  Smart Maintenance is the collection and linking of data from machines, plants or building equipped with sensors that continuously measure their functionality and performance and forward the data to digital applications, ideally a central application platform to the technical infrastructures, or intelligent maintenance system (IMS).  The IMS system utilizes collected data to predict and prevent potential system failures. Any failure in a system can be costly and/or even catastrophic.  Analyzing the behavior of a system is possible using advanced sensors, data collection systems, data storage/transfer capabilities and emerging data analysis software.

 

Predictive maintenance goes one step further than smart maintenance and is designed to help determine the condition of in-service equipment to estimate when maintenance should be performed. Predictive maintenance applications based on artificial intelligence (AI), use of historical sensor data or real-time data to predict potential system problems and take preventive countermeasures. Companies can also determine the remaining service life of manufacturing plants and plant components and display the effects of changes, given certain inputs such as the intensity of use, for example.

 

As a condition-based maintenance, carried out as suggested by estimations of the degradation state of a given system, this approach promises cost-savings over routine or time-based preventive maintenance with maintenance tasks performed only when required.

 

Amentum’s Four Key Elements of Smart Maintenance

 

Work Management

 

Amentum’s managers apply work management techniques to help teams and organizations improve productivity and efficiency, enhancing workflow and workload scheduling to achieve project and organization-wide objectives. Knowing what work management entails and how to use it effectively is critical in allowing Amentum to achieve their productivity targets and reduce delays.

 

As a tool for understanding their tasks, these processes help our individual employees and teams achieve a high level of clarity. This helps improve coordination and collaboration, reduce delays, and ensures team members have the right information to achieve maximum productivity and efficiency.

 

Our work management processes focus on streamlining the activities of employees in projects or processes without well-defined milestones and can apply to the scope or organization of a project or its implementation. Project planning, task scheduling, resource management, performance evaluations, project reviews and assessments are some of the variables our managers can improve with the application of these work management tools.

 

The benefits Amentum has seen include:

 

• Improved work scheduling
• Maximization of resource use and allocation
• Enhanced performance and results
• Improved business agility
• Enhanced collaboration
• Increased measures of productivity
• Improved decision making

 

Procurement Management

 

The term procurement management, also called supply management, refers to the methods and processes of modern corporate or institutional buying. Amentum’s procurement management uses a systematic process that includes more functions than traditional buying, such as coordinating inbound and internal pre-production logistics and managing inventory.

 

We have incorporated technology solutions including reverse engineering, 3D scanning and additive manufacturing, robotic process automation (RPA) and other automated best-value decision tools to improve systems and deliver cost efficiencies.

 

Amentum’s complete procurement solution leverages critical information to assist our procurement managers in proactively managing ongoing activities throughout the source-to-settle cycle. Additionally, Amentum’s SupplyTrac^TM tool incorporates advanced features in RPA, real-time transportation tracking, and an automated best-value decision tool, as well as custom metrics management, client-accessible dashboards, security features that integrate with multiple government information technology systems.

 

Inventory/Asset Management

 

Every company has the challenge of matching its supply volume to customer demand. In contrast to the traditional “binge and purge” inventory cycle in which companies overpurchased items based on “possible demand spikes” and then discard extra product, inventory optimization through inventory/asset management seeks to efficiently match supply to expected customer demand.

 

Like all analytical processes, predictive inventory/asset management involves making sense out of a large assortment of data. These data sets include historical customer demand data, industry benchmark data, supply chain data, and internal material demand data from the “plant floor” to forecast the need for specific items. The goal is to eliminate the guesswork by filtering and analyzing inventory data to account for all the different variables that affect inventory and demand.

 

Amentum uses a predictive inventory/asset management process which supports developing, operating, maintaining, upgrading and disposing of assets in the most cost-effective manner. The process functions to help our managers in identifying the optimum inventory mix of a given contract. The level of demand is influenced by both internal and external factors and must be balanced by purchase order requests to keep supplies at a reasonable or prescribed level.

 

Amentum’s process uses predictive analytics to forecast future risks that have the potential to disrupt inventory availability. The analytical process takes into consideration fluctuating demand through demand forecasting, historical data and other trends to proactively manage inventory.

 

Contract Management

 

Contract management directly impacts an organization’s revenue, budget, and operations. It influences the way you are viewed by existing and potential customers as well as the public and touches on every aspect of your company. Contracts are crucial to the success of any business arrangement. A consistent and efficient contract management process guides and streamlines the management of each contract through all its phases, from creation, negotiation on terms and conditions, and approval, through execution, performance and compliance on deliverables and deadlines.

 

Amentum’s contract management process is dependent on several factors, including contract value, contract length, complexity of services, the number of sub-contractors and level of risk. Based on these considerations, Amentum establishes a dedicated contract management team or operational contract manager to provide contract management functions within their role. Amentum’s experience has shown that having a dedicated contract team focused on governance versus compliance management — for more complex contracts or contracts with greater risk — provides a more collaborative, flexible, and credible relationship with customers.

 

Amentum’s contract management process has four main goals:

 

• Establishing governance and the contract management team
• Planning, establishing, and executing contract administration,
• Managing relationships, and
• Managing performance.

 

What We Bring to the Fight

 

As stated by Dr. Spinnenweber, “Our award-winning approach decreases mean time to repair and increases mean time between failures for our client’s key assets by taking advantage of the quality data gained via Maximo’s Mobile Informer app that allows us to analyze it (meaning “data”) through a robust data analytics platform.”

 

Industrial Maintenance Services

 

Amentum provides integrated management services for more than 65,000 pieces of equipment, including over 4,800 critical assets globally. Our technical services include:

 

• Reliability centered Maintenance (RCM) / predictive maintenance (PdM)
• Preventive and corrective maintenance
• Maintaining and troubleshooting mechanical, electrical, and hydraulic systems and equipment
• Troubleshooting and performing repairs
• Production line and plant maintenance
• Electrical and mechanical analysis
• Automated guided vehicle (AGV) maintenance and logistics
• Computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) implementation and support
• Preventive and predictive maintenance for high-voltage equipment, as well as forklift trucks, hoists, cranes and more

 

Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul Life Cycle Management

 

Amentum’s customers rely on maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) services to control costs and improve efficiency through day-to-day buys, extending the lifespan of their assets while warranting the best cost-efficiency, quality, and safety. Our technicians strategically look at the MRO supply that support operations, including critical spare parts for mission critical systems. Our services include:

 

• Development of an overall parts program inventory, storage and control of tools and materials,
• Create efficiencies in the reordering process,
• Prioritize stocking of parts for critical assets,
• Improve visibility of available parts and reduce time in manual search,
• Implement barcoding capabilities to ease search of parts,
• Create a centralized approach and avoid duplication in the acquisition process,
• Provide constant oversight through continuous review of criticality,
• Record inspection findings and document the entire maintenance history on each product unit, and

 

Ensure production lines and service operations receive new engineering changes,

 

• Track costs and invoicing

 

Amentum is leading the way in the integration of cutting-edge predictive maintenance solutions. By investing in new systems that streamline operations and enable rapid problem solving, Amentum continues to provide the highest level of quality of service to its customers.