DMO News: RAMping up for reform | ADM Sep 2010
Jane Wolfe | Canberra
What is the best outcome for the Army in terms of service intervals for vehicles?
Is it the usage rate (distance travelled) or the time since the last service, or a bit of both?
The Defence Materiel Organisation (DMO) and Army are answering this question through a mix of engineering expertise, military experience and the latest developments in the science of reliability, availability and maintainability (RAM) testing.
The potential benefits in terms of cost reductions and enhancing equipment availability are a great example of genuine reform-led initiatives being pursued by Defence under the Strategic Reform Program (SRP).
An initial pilot program involving Land Rover vehicles identified that those vehicles were being over-serviced.
The strict adherence to an annual servicing regime meant that some vehicles travelling less than 5,000 kilometres in a 12-month period were still being fully serviced.
For the Land Rover, the time period has now been extended to two years or 10,000km which will effectively halve the number of services being conducted.
In conjunction with this change, the DMO and Army are also implementing improved safety checks and reviewing oil sampling analysis to provide better forecasts of maintenance requirements in some land vehicle fleets.
The benefits include a saving in consumables as well as boosting the productivity of Army tradespeople, who can now be redirected from routine maintenance tasks to other, higher priorities.
Critically, this change is also expected to reduce the potential impact of maintenance-induced failures.
The examination of the best service intervals is now being extended to the remainder of the Army’s B Vehicle fleets (Unimog and Mack trucks) and will also be conducted for A Vehicle fleets including Abrams tanks and light armoured vehicles.
Army units are also applying the same logic, with the requirement for non-technical inspections of training ground and parade vehicles recently changed from monthly to quarterly.
Considering that drivers are required to perform a series of checks every day that a vehicle is used, an additional formal inspection every month has now been deemed unnecessary.
Immediate benefits of the change include reduced expenditure on consumables and more time for our soldiers to devote to training and other tasks.
The Army and DMO are working together to emphasise that the SRP challenge is an opportunity to identify areas for reform, and to re-direct resources to other high priority tasks and to supporting our future capabilities.
I look forward to bringing you more examples of real SRP reform that supports the work of the ADF.