Defence Calibrations: How big data improved availability and cut costs
While large scale platform-based defence programs are often at the centre of public attention for better or worse, most of these programs would not exist without the calibration and testing services that are critical to keeping them operational.
The calibration and testing capability for the Australian Defence Force (ADF) was a service that the ADF managed in-house until 2010, when Raytheon Australia was awarded a contract to provide this service.
Drawing upon the lessons learned from the F-111 sustainment approach, Raytheon Australia applied the same theory to evaluate defence calibrations and testing services. The company’s team of engineering and integrated logistics experts worked together to analyse the current program to determine where they could find even greater efficiencies.
One recurring issue facing the team was the localised nature of the existing ADF Calibration capability, which was not able to manage ADF calibrations on a ‘whole of system’ basis.
With this in mind, the team recognised that if they centralised all of the data into one system, they could gain improvements across multiple aspects of Defence calibration services. Raytheon Australia created a central repository of collated accurate and timely data of all the capabilities around the country that it serviced. With this database, the team would be able to use ‘big data’ – analysing capabilities from a whole-of-life perspective for the first time.
Raytheon Australia also acknowledged an opportunity to improve the turnaround time from capability pick up to drop off. The team partnered with Star Track, an industry-leading express freight and logistics company that could more efficiently move serviced capability from one location to the next.
Once these two improvements were in place, the team took it one step further by linking Star Track to the centralised database. In doing so, the team was able to book new jobs whilst Star Track was delivering on other jobs – a benchmark new efficiency, which saved one full day of turn around time.
This enabled 98.4 per cent of all capabilities to be picked up, serviced and returned to the customer all within just 10 days. Not only did this new approach improve availability, it also delivered considerable cost savings to the customer. The team was able to halve the number of calibrations labs needed for servicing – from seven labs down to three. Additionally, because this new database delivered automated call-outs, the team was able to consolidate from four production controllers down to one.
This has led to Raytheon Australia servicing more than 11,000 calibrations per year, in support of 350 units throughout the Australian Defence Force across multiple domains.