CTMA Project #: 140435
Problem: In July 2003, DoD directed that all new solicitations and contracts issues on or after January 1, 2004, require the use of IUID for items meeting established criteria and then in December 2004, the IUID policy was updated to require the application of UID to legacy items (that is, existing property items in inventory and operational use). In this memo, DoD requested all programs and item managers plan to complete this marking by the end of 2010. DoD officials estimate the number of legacy items is probably around 100M; however, the actual number of items could be much higher.
IUID marking will require changes to Technical Data Packages (TDP) to identify a marking location and specifications for the mark. The marking location decision requires engineering action for reasons of balance, fatigue resistance, material properties, etc. The Air Force ran a study to determine the cost of a fully manual process to modify TDP’s and documented a cost between $3,000 and $5,000. The low hanging fruit would be parts that have nameplates or data plates because the engineering work has already been done in deciding nameplate location. Tools that reduce engineering effort for this process cab save hundreds of millions of dollars.
Benefit: The Air Force identified a pool of 75,000 active legacy parts for first efforts. Based on metrics gathered, the cost for these parts would be between $225M and $375M. If project technology performs as anticipated, labor costs will drop an order of magnitude. No one knows what portion of those 75,000 parts already have nameplates but the cost savings for those parts is projected to be at minimum $2,500 per part.
Solution/Approach: This project will integrate stitching of multiple frames and raster to vector conversion from the Modernizing Tech Data project, intelligent optical character recognition from the Legacy Lifecycle Data Management project, and shape search from the Casting Cost Advisor project. To these technologies it will add the capability of creating an AutoCAD Engineering Change Order (ECO) form with the appropriate IUID marking drawing.
The system will clean up a JEDMICS managed drawing, stitching together multiple frames and necessary and converting from raster to vector format. It will then search for a nameplate location and specification using templates of expected types as a reference. It will then add an IUID marking location and specification, create a drawing overlay, and create an AutoCAD ECO.
Impact on Warfighter: This project will develop and demonstrate a toolset that will reduce nonrecurring engineering required to add IUID marking locations and specifications to legacy parts, thereby reducing the time needed to achieve complete lifecycle part tracking. Complete lifecycle part tracking is a necessary prerequisite to understanding of deployment environment and optempo effects on reliability. Part reliability is a readiness driver.
DOD Participation:
- U.S. Air Force (OC-ALC)
- AFMC
Industry Participation:
- Imaginestics
- NCMS
