Just-in-time sustainment

Sustainment engineers, responsible for insuring that military avionics systems are supportable, are facing increasing challenges to assure that the systems for which they are accountable are mission ready. Deciding what sustainment actions are necessary and when they need to be performed is the key to the "just-in-time" sustainment concept being pursued by the F-15 Hardware Avionics Section at the Warner Robins Air Logistics Center (WR-ALC/LFEFA). This concept requires that the sustainer have visibility into all aspects of a system. The sustainer must consider system configurations, indentured parts lists and their interchangeability, component obsolescence, assembly repair information, repair history down to the component level, spares at all assembly levels, Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) and depot component inventory and usage rates, and anticipated force structure. The sustainer needs an analysis tool to correlate all these data to determine what needs to be done and when it needs to be accomplished before mission readiness is impacted. The SUSTAIN^TM (sustainment strategy for avionics information needs) tool, developed by the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTFI), allows implementation of a true just-in-time sustainment approach by consolidating all the required information into a single automated tool that displays data in a concise and informative manner. This paper describes SUSTAIN^TM, its data sources, and analysis capabilities