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| May 2010
Welcome to The CTMA Connector, a monthly newsletter designed to provide news and ideas about the Commercial Technologies for Maintenance Activities (CTMA) program. The CTMA program is a joint Department of Defense/National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (DoD/NCMS) effort promoting collaborative technology development between industry and the DoD maintenance and repair facilities. This newsletter highlights ongoing projects, serves as a forum for promoting new project ideas, and provides other news of interest to the program. Our goal is to stimulate your participation and solicit your input. Feel free to submit items for the newsletter as well as any suggestions to make it more useful. More information about the program can be found at http://ctma.ncms.org/. To subscribe or unsubscribe to the CTMA Connector, send a message to listserv@listserv.ncms.org with “subscribe CTMANewsletter” or “unsubscribe CTMANewsletter” in the message body. We welcome the following company into NCMS: The POM Group, Inc. (www.pomgroup.com) The POM Group, Inc. is a full service provider of technologies and services for Rapid Product Development. POM specializes in the design and build of Direct Metal Deposition (DMD) additive manufacturing systems which provide solutions for our clients in the Automotive, Aerospace, Mining, Oil & Gas and Nuclear and Defense industries. Participate in our fourth Technology Showcase at the Marine Corps Maintenance Center, Albany, GA June 8-9, 2010 Marine Corps Logistics Base, Albany Maintenance Center, Albany, Georgia. Register at https://www.ncms.org/SSL/2010MCLB/registration.htm A block of rooms are reserved at the Hilton Garden Inn Albany. Please go to the NCMS website for additional information regarding accommodations. Please reserve your rooms early. The room block will be released Friday, 21 May. This is an exclusive opportunity for NCMS members to display technologies for managers, engineers, and artisans at the Marine Corps Logistics Base, Albany Maintenance Center, Albany, Georgia. The Albany Maintenance Center has provided a technology needs list that highlights many opportunity areas for industry. For those that are interested in obtaining more information regarding their mission, functions, products, services and forward ops please refer to this website http://www.logcom.usmc.mil/maintctr/ The Maintenance Center is interested in learning more about:
For more information regarding this exciting opportunity please contact Ms. Debbie Lilu at debral@ncms.org or call 734-995-7038.
NCMS Technology Showcase Brings Industry Innovation to FRC East On 28 29 April, FRC East hosted a Technology Showcase sponsored by the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (NCMS) through its Commercial Technologies for Maintenance Activities program (CTMA). The showcase brings leading technology companies into the Department of Defense (DoD) facilities to see first hand the challenges faced by the maintenance community in order to identify innovative commercial solutions. The Technology Showcase opened with NCMS member companies first touring the FRC East maintenance facilities. Next on the agenda were table top displays, strategically located throughout the depot to ensure easy access for all base personnel to see the technologies.. The table top displays provided industry representatives a unique opportunity to learn about challenges faced directly by the maintainers. The first day concluded with a networking event at the The Pitt. The final day was dedicated to one-on-one industry presentations with base personnel on solutions with immediate potential for deployment. The Technology Showcase is a powerful example of how the CTMA Program fast tracks innovative technical solutions from private industry directly into the hands of DoD personnel to increase systems availability while reducing cost. NCMS members displaying technology included DIT-MCO International, Aging Aircraft Consulting, LLC, Superior Controls, iMAST/ARL (Penn State), Stratasys, Eclypse International, Adapt Laser Systems, Automated Precision, Inc., Aerowing, Imaginestics, LLC, Spatial Integrated Systems, Inc., Spectro Inc., GSA Service Company, POM Group, REI Systems, Inc., and Pendaran Inc., Three CTMA projects have been identified to immediately meet FRC East needs:
Recently Completed CTMA Project: Light Armored Vehicle (LAV) Sense & Respond Support System Phase III DoD Participants: U.S. Army (TACOM); Program Manager Light Armored Vehicles (PM-LAV); U.S. Navy Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) Crane; U.S. Marine Corps Camp Pendletons LAV Company School of Infantry (West) There are currently three different approaches to logistics and supply chain management being utilized in the commercial world and throughout the DoD. The three approaches are: mass-based logistics, just-in-time logistics, and portions of Sense & Respond logistics. The U.S. Marine Corps is seeking to rapidly advance from a mass-based logistics approach to a Sense & Respond logistics approach. Testimonial for this fact is demonstrated in a number of Marine Corps future warfare concepts such as Operational Maneuver from the Sea (OMFTS), Seabasing, Joint Vision 2010, and Sea Power 21. LAV III was the third phase of the PM-LAV strategy to embrace Logistics Modernization and build on knowledge gained during the LAV Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM) Life Cycle Logistics Support Tool CTMA project. Asset health monitoring and the required support infrastructure were refined to enable scalable and web-based access to the end user. Sense & Respond saw the maturation of the Joint Asset Management Information Support System (JAMISS) as a tool designed to enable presentation of vehicle data in a coherent fashion in a scalable format for the end user. LAV III validated the Best in Breed selection of hardware, software and firmware designed to meet the PMs requirements for a system designed around flexibility and reliability in the end-to-end Enterprise architecture environment. One of the principal lessons learned during LAV I & II was that in order to achieve maximum benefit, there must be a sophisticated data support infrastructure in place. A system must be designed to capture the right data and then securely transmit the data throughout the Enterprise. For that reason, data movement, security and the ability to comply and operate in the DoDs exceptionally restrictive Information Assurance (IA) architecture were viewed as essential functionalities for the system as a whole. Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2 encrypted capabilities which conform to DoD approved wireless communication protocols were matured. The Local Maintenance Server (LMS) installed by NSWC Crane during LAV II at Camp Pendletons School of Infantry (West) continued to serve as a gateway for data moving to the Enterprise server at Crane, IN and into the Enterprise as a whole. In order for data coming off of the vehicle platform to have value the data must be viewed as actionable by the appropriate stakeholder. The value or value proposition of actionable data is customer specific. Customers in the Enterprise range from the Marine who maintains the individual vehicle on the ramp up to and including the PM who has a holistic view of the fleet, each with a different view of what actionable means. Building on lessons from LAV II the PM and industry partners developed a list of key data items viewed as important to PM stakeholders up and down the chain of command. The agreed upon list of data parameters was collected and reported throughout the course of LAV III. The collection of the right data was further validated against a comprehensive Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) analysis performed at the beginning of LAV III. PM-LAV strongly believes the architecture implemented and further validated operationally during the LAV III project is designed to meet the operational needs of not only the LAV community but is scalable for all DoD ground vehicle fleets. The continued maturation of hardware, software and Enterprise functionalities in LAV III closely mirrors what PM-LAV seeks to implement across its entire vehicle fleet. Moving forward with the implementation of refined, web-based Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) applications, scalable common operational pictures, Item Unique Identifier (IUID) technology and increasingly reliable, unobtrusive hardware solutions is the envisioned goal. LAV III data formatting, encryption methodologies and vehicle network development meet commercial and DoD standards and are designed for implementation independently or in parallel with other Autonomics Logistics (AL) or GCSS-J developmental efforts. A visionary approach to data parsing and event triggers will yield maximum effectiveness in the highly restrictive, limited-tactical-bandwidth environment to gain maximum benefit of technology for users at all levels. The LAV III project incorporated advanced commercial Sense & Respond logistics tools on the LAV-25, a complete legacy platform. The principals and hardware developed and proven during this project have a demonstrated capability to transfer easily and economically to other legacy and state-of-the-art weapon systems platforms. The ability to leverage this technology across multiple platforms enables reproducible capabilities across the DoD. The benefits of this project include:
The NCMS contact is Debbie Lilu at debral@ncms.org. 734-995-7038. 2010 CTMA Symposium “Sustaining Technology Through the 21st Century” The 11th Annual CTMA Working Symposium was held 22-24 March at Quantico. The Symposium included briefs from each of the services on their process for determining maintenance requirements, as well as project briefs from DoD sponsored programs involving sustainment. Officials from each of the services discussed their maintenance technology requirements and their approach to new technologies. In addition, project reviews for CTMA projects as well as projects from selected other DoD-sponsored programs highlighted new technologies targeted for implementation in the maintenance community. Presentations will be made available to non-participants in July. We would like to also thank the following companies for their sponsorship of the Symposium: We appreciate your feedback. Please contact Chuck Ryan with suggestions or input on other topics that would be of interest to you in this newsletter. The CTMA Program is sponsored by the Department of Defense; the content of this newsletter does not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the government; no official endorsement should be inferred. |
| © 2010 |
