CTMA Project #: 140431
Problem: The Department of Defense (DoD) spends $86 billion annually on weapon system maintenance with continuing cost growth due to inflation and new acquisitions. These expanding costs create the need for new practices that increase the overall speed and quality of maintenance actions while integrating maintenance, configuration management, and other logistics practices.
There are currently three different approaches to logistics and supply chain management being utilized in the commercial world and throughout the DoD. Those three approaches are mass-based logistics, just-in-time logistics, and portions of Sense & Respond logistics. The Marine Corps is seeking to rapidly advance from a mass-based logistics approach, to a Sense & Respond Logistics approach.
The LAV SRSS has become the Marine Corps Center of Excellence for creating a Sense & Respond architecture.
The Sense & Respond – LAV III project would allow the PM-LAV to demonstrate and assess the feasibility of a technology insertion prior to commencing the acquisition process. In addition, the PM and the user community would be able to assess the doctrinal and manpower implications of the technology.
This project continues to build off the successes of the first two phases of the project by expanding the scope and deployment of the technology within the Marine Corps, particularly:
- Refining the existing on-board Asset Health Monitoring (AHM) system to improve accuracy and reliability
- Incorporating new methods and technologies such as the item unique identification device (IUID) and radio frequency identification (RFID) to gain better information regarding asset history, reliability, availability, and more asset management.
Benefit: This project will incorporate state-of-the-art affordable and highly flexible commercial Sense & Respond logistic tools on a legacy military vehicle and will yield significant benefits. The principals and hardware developed and proven during this project will transfer easily and economically to other legacy weapon systems, making the benefits reproducible across the DoD.
- An estimated 10% reduction in required maintainer man-hours will be realized through implementation of Sense & Respond principals.
- An estimated 30% man-hour savings in maintenance support operations by embracing IUID off platform.
- Increase in LAV availability equal to the equivalent of 34 vehicles (LAV Company +) at no additional cost to the Marine Corps.
- Projected savings in cost of operations of $10,000,000 per year in the LAV fleet.
- This project will enable maintainers to accurately and efficiently monitor system health, predict equipment failure, diagnose malfunctions, request assistance, and order necessary parts on an LAV A2.
Solution/Approach: In Sense & Respond – LAV III, the PM-LAV intends to pursue a comprehensive approach to incorporate a variety of new capabilities, leverage the capacities of each against the others, and fully integrate these with existing technologies and processes already in use so that we create a single, flexible, all inclusive environment in which information is gathered once and used many times by a variety of stakeholders. In this environment, bits of data from disparate sources can be combined, sorted and collated in different sets to obtain diverse bundles of knowledge.
Impact on Warfighter: This effort will reduce troubleshooting, diagnosis, and repair times both at the Depot and in the field to improve overall readiness rates.
DOD Participation:
- U.S. Army (TACOM) USMC PM-LAV
- U.S. Navy (NSWC Crane)
- U.S. Marines (SOI Camp Pendleton)
Industry Participation:
- Solidica
- Radian Precision
- Ricardo
- Black & Rossi
- RW Appleton & Company
- NCMS
