Enterprise health management framework - A holistic approach for technology planning, R&D collaboration and transition

Health management technologies are critical for detecting and predicting impending system faults before actual failures occur, initiating fault mitigation, and producing data to enable proactive logistics planning and fleet operations decision processes. While early indications in certain initiatives within the government and commercial sectors are beginning to show promising results, the authors observe that there is a need to develop a holistic, systems engineering approach to facilitate program needs assessment, health management technology planning, coordinated research and development, and effective transition of emerging health management capabilities to both new and legacy platforms. Health management, unlike other platform capabilities, is not a self-contained, stand-alone ldquosystemrdquo, but is rather an integral part of every subsystem, system, the entire platform, and ultimately affects the entire logistics support enterprise. This holistic view requires a new mindset within our industry. The authors propose that what is needed is a systems engineering approach that would be used throughout an enterprise for technology planning, research and development collaboration and effective transition to operational programs. The proposed systems engineering approach provides an enterprise health management (EHM) framework for assessing operational needs and business case, identifying technology gaps, roadmaps and collaboration opportunities, assessing enterprise integration constraints and transition planning. This paper discusses the conceptual EHM Framework, some examples of the potential benefits, and the critical implementation issues.