CTMA Program

About CTMA

The Commercial Technologies for Maintenance Activities (CTMA) has a relentless focus on defense maintenance, sustainment, and logistics. Created in 1998, CTMA utilizes a Cooperative Agreement (CA) that forms a partnership between NCMS and the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Materiel Readiness (ODASD MR). Its objective is to ensure American warfighters and their equipment are ready to face any situation, with the most up-to-date and best-maintained platforms, data, and tools available. It provides technology demonstrations, evaluations, and validations that deliver critical maintenance and sustainment solutions. Each project is required by the underlying CA to deliver benefits to the US military and the public good.

CTMA offers an agile and streamlined contracting vehicle to advance the development, integration, and use of innovative commercial sustainment technologies and processes. CTMA initiatives focus on improvements in reliability, process efficiency, performance capabilities, sustainment cycles, and personnel safety, along with optimizing business practices and data collection/management.

CTMA Focus Areas

  • Advanced/Additive Manufacturing
  • Business IT and Analytics
  • CBM+/Predictive Maintenance
  • Coating and Corrosion Prevention
  • Energy, Environmental, Health, and Safety
  • Enhanced Inspection
  • Facilities and Industrial Process Modernization
  • Reliability Improvement (Hardware)
  • Workforce Development/Visualization

The CTMA Advantage

  • Enables partners to provide and share personnel, services, facilities, equipment, and other resources in conducting demonstration/evaluation efforts

  • Streamlines passage from demonstration to technology transition

  • Delivers contracting and cost accounting expertise

  • Reduces time between innovation and commercialization

  • Offers industry partners an opportunity to enhance DOD readiness while reaching corporate objectives

  • Provides a means of sharing technical expertise, ideas, and information in a protected environment, with non-government partners retaining intellectual property rights

“CTMA is one of the only mechanisms that moves as fast as they do. Getting a technology to demonstration within 45 days is almost unheard of. I truly believe that it is mission critical to see how we can leverage the expertise that we discover through this collaboration.”

– Janice Bryant, Sustainment and Expeditionary Maintenance Manager, Naval Sea Systems Command

How CTMA Works

  • DOD maintenance activities have needs and requirements which are potentially solved by innovations developed by industry and academia.
  • NCMS holds an unparalleled contracting vehicle to demonstrate commercial technologies prior to DOD acquisition.
  • Companies with innovative solutions partner with NCMS and leverage the CTMA Program to maximize their investment in technology. This collaboration guides companies and DOD to secure commercially available technology solutions.

  • NCMS understands DOD’s maintenance and sustainment (M&S) needs and is well connected to industry and academia. Acting as a neutral third party, NCMS brings together DOD and industry to evaluate and validate an innovative capability to deliver benefits to DOD’s M&S community.

  • NCMS quickly develops project teams to connect DOD with industry providers, integrators, and users

The CTMA Value

CTMA offers industry and the DOD sustainment community significant benefits:

Commercial Partner Benefits
  • Provides access to DOD facilities and equipment
  • Reduces cost of R&D through leveraging and sharing
  • Reduces time between innovation and commercial production
  • Offers opportunities to commercialize inventions
  • Offers opportunities to enhance DOD preparedness while reaching corporate objectives
  • Secures a focused concentration of effort on specific industrial challenges
  • Enables profitable new product and process
DOD Benefits
  • Supports increased lethality and a more viable industrial base.
  • Streamlines contracting and cost accounting
  • Focuses on advanced technologies that improve military capabilities
  • Improves opportunities to develop and transfer mutually beneficial technologies
  • Reduces cost of R&D through leveraging and sharing
  • Allows testing, evaluation, and adaptation of technology before acquisition
  • Enables participation of commercial entities with specific technical expertise that have no government sector past performance
  • Expands industrial base through multiple uses of technologies
  • Increases familiarity with market needs and trends
NCMS Advantages for DOD
  • A well-honed documented management process
  • Well qualified, experienced program management focusing on technology transition
  • Streamlined business process – 45 to 90 days from cradle to execution
  • Extensive outreach to industry and academia
  • Thorough understanding of DOD maintenance and sustainment needs