Original Date: 08/20/2001
Revision Date: 12/14/2006

The Supportability Engineering Analysis Report is an in-house electronic manual. This manual helps identify items of supportability concern and ways to mitigate them.

Although its Integrated Logistic Support Plan was designed for ships and systems, Lockheed Martin Naval Electronics & Surveillance Systems-Surface Systems (NE&SS-SS) attempted to use this process for individual equipment. Supportability documents were implemented; however, they were not kept at a single location. Initially, all equipment systems were designed by Lockheed Martin NE&SS-SS but, subsequently, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) equipment began being added piecemeal through engineering change proposals. To provide centralized maintainability and supportability aspects in a user-friendly environment, Lockheed Martin NE&SS-SS developed and implemented the Supportability Engineering Analysis Report (SEAR).

SEAR is an in-house electronic manual. This manual provides information on determining the optimum maintainability support strategy for equipment, and enables the company to maintain a balance among all supportability and maintainability criteria reflected by readiness, operational capability, life cycle cost, and Integrated Logistics Support. SEAR addresses supply support, life cycle cost, Combat Systems Operational Sequence Systems, preventive/corrective maintenance plans, support equipment, technology refresh/insertion plans, configuration management, Fleet support, hazardous materials, human engineering, technical manuals, and training. In addition, this manual documents the results of Maintainability/Supportability Engineering Analysis by addressing Failure Modes Effects and Criticality Analysis, reliability centered maintenance, level of repair analysis, and maintenance task analysis. SEAR is required to ensure that design-drive ownership costs are minimized for the life of the program.

Through SEAR, Lockheed Martin NE&SS-SS can identify items of supportability concern and ways to mitigate them, and assist customers in planning future budgetary requirements by defining total ownership cost and developing a technology refresh/insertion plan. Funded by PMS400 (Aegis) and Lockheed Martin NE&SS-SS for four different systems, SEAR has proved to be very cost effective. The ultimate goal is to implement this method on-board all ships, so that the manual will be electronically available to sailors.

For more information see the Point of Contact for this survey.