Leveraging Total Ownership Cost analysis to optimize in-service R&M programs

There will never be enough money for all the reliability and maintainability (R&M) investments we can identify as potentially worthwhile. However, innovative processing of the output of sufficiently detailed total ownership cost analyses makes it possible to identify the most promising improvement opportunities, rank them in order of economic viability, and build competitive business cases for implementation. A powerful and highly intuitive software prototype has been deployed to this end into several weapon system programs. While the extent to which it achieves its basic aim of optimizing resource investments will take some years to establish, sufficient interest has been generated to justify significant refinement effort.