The Peter Mitchell Churchill Fellowship to bring international Reliability Engineering best practice to Australian Defence and industry

Recommendations for the RAN

This research has led to the following recommendations:

• Implement RAM Defence Enterprise Round Tables with the military, Capability Acquisition and Sustainment Group, and Defence industries to foster effective professional relationships and to support communication throughout the Enterprise
• Imbed Defence RAM personnel within Defence industry teams
• Implement an open lessons learned register which can be accessed by technical personnel from all Defence organisations
• Investigate the practicality of utilising 3D printing technologies for emergency sparing
• Introduce integrated condition monitoring systems
• Automate data collection, transfer and analysis. This may require recruiting, training and retaining software engineers/data scientists to determine the most valuable use of existing RAN data and to develop analysis algorithms
• Enforce witnessed sub‐system and integration reliability testing in acquisition
• Build a consolidated database of acquisition and sustainment costs in order to assist in accurate life‐cycle‐costing
• Ensure shore front personnel are involved in design reviews
• Introduce Asset Tracking
• Introduce a rolling Fleet wide maintenance optimisation program

The complete report includes the processes, required resources, responsibilities and estimated milestones for the implementation of the recommendations. The viability of implementing each of these recommendations within the RAN will be explored and the resulting tasks prioritised. Learnings from the implementation, both successes and failures will be incorporated into Defence Reliability Engineering training courses and will be shared at relevant industry and Defence conferences.

Due to the Security Classification of the included information, the complete report will not be publicly available.

Keywords: Defence, Reliability Engineering, RAM, RAN, Navy, Maritime, Supportability