Cost reduction during maintenance & repair

Low-technology equipment test and repair is typically composed of numerous manual actions performed in a series of predetermined steps. This paper describes a recently deployed rework/production system that eliminates all of the superfluous 'process control and tracking' effort required during operational system test and maintenance, and allows support personnel to focus on their primary task of testing and repairing operational systems. The deployed system is totally 'paperless' and eliminates all operational costs associated with the preparing, handling, controlling, storing, and checking or auditing efforts found with traditional paper-based test and maintenance systems. Logging of all test, measurement, repair or rework activities, and their metrics support any possible audit or process improvement initiative. This capability also yields a further indeterminate, yet tangible cost reduction during maintenance and overhaul activities in a depot rework or production environment. It also establishes that other cost-saving improvements, such as reducing the ambiguity within the probable cause of failure (PCOF) diagnostic at the O or I level, based on depot historical repair statistics, could also directly benefit from this type of system.