“Thinking out of the box” strategy resulted in compliant FSS R&M program implementation

Each project is expected to encompass some unique requirements and performance criteria that would require the Reliability and Maintainability (R&M) lead to exercise some level of innovation; but with professional growth the implementation of an R&M program for a known application and similar complexity of legacy programs, successful implementation becomes less and less challenging over time. This paper will present a specific ongoing case where the R&M program implementation was well out of the norm of expectations in many ways, including the application, system makeup and complexity, lack of R&M historical data, reliability modeling usage to address equipment technology, as well as vast amount of and frequency of contract deliverables. This paper will present how the R&M Integrated Product Team\´s (IPT), thinking out of the box strategy resulted in upfront success and just as importantly provided a composite R&M dataset for future evaluations against actual performance metrics. These "before" and "after" metrics will allow the project\´s customer, the United States Postal Service (USPS), the much needed baselines to drive to equipment availability as well as legacy information for future project planning.. The R&M IPT\´s "thinking out of the box" strategies included taking ownership for some upfront tasks that are typically out of the realm of functional responsibility as well as subsequently designing, developing and testing a RMA consolidated analysis tool within a very accelerated timeframe. These actions were mandated to drive the availability of the required information for R&M analyses required for the Preliminary Design Review (PDR) which was held 6 months after contract award, as well as the need to define a method to reduce duplication of efforts and increase work productivity and product integrity across functional organizations.