ARNOLD AIR FORCE BASE, TENN. -- The efforts of those leading the Asset Health Assurance program at AEDC, who develop the long-term reliability and maintenance program for the Test Operations and Sustainment, or TOS, contract, is greatly benefiting the Complex by providing cost avoidance savings.

David Hurst, AHA program manager at AEDC, said there has already been large savings in the first four months of the TOS contract alone.

“There has been over $300,000 of savings to the maintenance programs through preventative maintenance (PM) deferrals and waivers using predictive maintenance data collection and analysis, through changes to the procurement program via the item configuration management effort and through the PM optimization work with system engineers to extend PM intervals,” he said.

Hurst added the success of the program is a result of the different parts of this effort working together.

“The first part is expanding the Predictive Maintenance Program by incorporating technologies such as infrared, ultrasound, vibration analysis and oil testing to reduce the need for intrusive preventative maintenance,” he said. “This will reduce the cost of the maintenance program by reducing the number of traditional or intrusive preventative maintenances and reducing the opportunity for failures. The second part is Preventative Maintenance Optimization or using maintenance data analysis, predictive technology data, and failure data analysis, which will right-size the preventative maintenance program. For example, performing the preventative maintenance when needed driven by the equipment and not the calendar.

“Third is Item Configuration Management, and this part of the effort will work with our spare parts program, vendors and purchasing to update the bill of materials for critical assets and to make sure the asset data in the Computerized Maintenance Management System is accurate.

Essentially, this effort’s goal is to make sure we have the right parts available when needed and to know where we can get these parts as needed and that correct asset data is available in order to properly manage the equipment.”

Part of the AHA program also includes having reliability engineering managers assigned to each mission area at Arnold AFB: Flight, Propulsion, Space and Missiles and Utilities.

“The purpose is to give each area a point of contact for their maintenance program and to make sure that the reliability and maintenance program is consistent across the facilities,” Hurst said. “They are the ‘change agents’ for each area, interfacing with the mission area’s management and engineers to help change the way we look at reliability and maintenance.”

According to Hurst, as TOS continues with this effort, the savings will continue to grow.

-AEDC-