LifeCycle-ONE
Background
In the past, procurement decisions have been made on the basis of acquisition costs with less attention on the cost of supporting equipment adequately throughout the life cycle. Today the focus of attention is on establishing a whole life, through life approach. This requires the identification of whole life costs at the earliest point possible in the acquisition cycle and the need to monitor and control costs throughout a systems’ service life.
Model Name and Overview Description
Technology Service Corporation (TSC) has developed LifeCycle-ONE a unique technology to apply increased oversight and discipline to the Department of Defense (DoD) acquisition decision making process. Acquisition affordability and weapon system combat readiness continue to drive the need for the development of adaptable and robust modeling techniques designed to provide program management offices with the ability to make informed acquisition decisions early in the acquisition program. Cost, schedule, and performance challenges have often been found to be linked systemically to design considerations early in the life-cycle of programs whose life costs have grown beyond acceptable limits. LifeCycle-ONE is a deterministic model founded on logistic principles, algorithms and historical data. LifeCycle-ONE will enable the Acquisition Professional to isolate design based cost drivers to evaluate the total life-cycle cost implications of system design decisions throughout the acquisition process in order to:
- Meet mission/system performance requirements
- Minimize Operations & Support (O&S) costs through system life cycle
- Optimize design decisions made before a system transits early milestones as this will greatly influence the cost of sustainment and logistics elements in the O&S Phase
- Graphically portray O&S cost data to gain immediate understanding of the impact design decisions will have on acquisition budgets and organizations.
- Incorporate new / emerging technologies into legacy systems that can both extend the life of and reduce the continuing costs of sustainment / logistics elements.
LifeCycle-ONE will enable the Program Executive Office (PEO) to estimate the impact certain Reliability/Maintainability/Availability (RAM) cost drivers built into a program's system design will correspondingly have on that program's total O&S costs. Utilizing LifeCycle-ONE flexible user assessment parameters and acquisition program inputs, a Program Manager will be empowered to make smarter design choices early in the life of an acquisition program.
Technology Service Corporation understands both the breadth and depth of the challenges associated with performing engineering analyses to develop a decision support tool to evaluate the impact design requirements have on the overall fleet support infrastructure for ship systems. TSC’s approach is predicated on the analysis of system design attributes (e.g. complexity, manufacturability, technical readiness levels, etc.) and their effect on O&S cost elements (e.g. sparing, maintenance, manpower, training, facilities, etc.). The correlation between these design attributes and logistics cost elements results in potential cost drivers in weapon systems operations and support. A series of input questions such as the number of Lowest Replaceable Units (LRU), system Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF), Operational Availability (Ao), and Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) will define the system design and be used to populate algorithm parameters. TSC is ensuring that each question is supported by accompanying historical data discovered as part of our data mining activity. These input and output mechanisms will establish intuitive “levers” to conduct timely excursions by changing input constraints in order to optimize system design and affordability options.
The LifeCycle-ONE project is funded/owned by NAVSEA.