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.