October 2006

Welcome to The CTMA Connector, a monthly newsletter designed to provide news and ideas about the Commercial Technologies for Maintenance Activities (CTMA) program. The CTMA program is a joint Department of Defense/National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (DoD/NCMS) effort promoting collaborative technology development between industry and the DoD maintenance and repair facilities. This newsletter highlights ongoing projects, serves as a forum for promoting new project ideas, and provides other news of interest to the program. Our goal is to stimulate your participation and solicit your input. Feel free to submit items for the newsletter as well as any suggestions to make it more useful. More information about the program can be found at http://ctma.ncms.org/. To subscribe or unsubscribe to the CTMA Connector, send a message to listserv@listserv.ncms.org with "subscribe CTMANewsletter" or "unsubscribe CTMANewsletter" in the message body.

Save the Date

2007 CTMA SYMPOSIUM

Solutions Round-up

El Tropicano River Walk Hotel

San Antonio, Texas

March 26, - 29, 2007

•         Plenary session with key military along with private industry to identify critical problems at government facilities.

•          Breakout sessions to review ongoing projects and emerging ideas in:

  1. Platings and Coatings

  2. Lifecycle Management

  3. Monitoring and Inspection

  4. Electronics

  5. Low Volume Advanced Manufacturing

•          Meet new contacts and build relationships at the reception.

•          Table top displays for new technologies.

•

We welcome the following new member company into NCMS:

VCAMM (www.vcamm.com.au)

The Victorian Centre for Advanced Materials Manufacturing (VCAMM) offers a professional and commercial interface that provides innovative research and development of new and advanced materials and technologies for the materials industry including the automotive, aerospace, defense and biomedical.                                    

 

Now Scheduled for mid-January 2007

DoD Maintenance Technology Needs Workshops - "Production Management Systems"

This inaugural workshop will focus on production management systems.  Production management improves manufacturing operations throughout the product lifecycle by:

  • providing real-time manufacturing/repair information for process improvement,

  • reducing the manufacturing cycle time and increasing weapon system readiness and product throughput,

  • significantly reducing errors and implementation time between the planning and manufacturing processes, and

  • monitoring lifecycle product performance and identifying systemic repair needs.

The workshop is now tentatively planned for mid-January in Oklahoma City, OK in partnership with the Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center at Tinker AFB. Look for further announcements as plans solidify.  Interested participants should send an e-mail to Chuck Ryan at chuckr@ncms.org.  The workshop fee will be $150 for NCMS members and DoD, and $250 for non-members.

 

Recently Completed Project: Enhanced Wiring Integrity Systems 

The Enhanced Wiring Integrity System (EWIS) project provides improved commercially available test systems to enhance the troubleshooting and testing capabilities of the maintainers, ultimately improving the overall integrity of electrical wiring systems.  Wiring is truly a critical system that requires new maintenance tools and processes to address the following realities:

  • Thousands of mission aborts and hundreds of thousands of non-mission-capable hours per year are due to wiring incidents

  • Wiring maintenance issues consume several million maintenance man-hours annually

  • The economic need is to increase the mission readiness of materiels at reduced cost by requiring fewer maintenance man-hours and minimizing the repair and modification materiel costs.

Objectives were to implement a single or common test system that provided solutions:

  • Applicable to the joint services

  • Reduced the man-hours expended troubleshooting and repairing aircraft electrical wiring systems

  • Increased the reliability of dockside
     cranes with preventive and predictive maintenance

  • Reduced the work-hours expended troubleshooting and repairing field Army mobile shelter electrical wiring systems.

This project specifically addressed three problem areas – aircraft, dockside cranes, and high-density wired backplanes that would benefit from the implementation of EWIS.  Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center and the Naval Air Depot in Jacksonville focused on aircraft, while Portsmouth Naval Shipyard worked with dockside cranes and Tobyhanna Army Depot tested mobile shelter wiring. 

The project partners have successfully implemented wire maintenance inspection and/or troubleshooting capabilities at each of the sites. The EWIS-deployed equipment demonstrated support for Integrated Maintenance Concept and LEAN Processes. Sites varied but each site demonstrated success in one or more of the following areas:

  • Increased readiness due to reduced cycle time to effect repair

  • Reduction in maintenance man-hours associated with the testing and troubleshooting of wire assemblies

  • Insertion of new tools and demonstrated capability to implement proactive wire maintenance

  • Cost avoidance due to early problem detection

  • Overall improved wiring integrity.

The NCMS contact is Lee Patch, leep@ncms.org, 734-995-4972.

 

Participants needed on New Project Ideas:  Submit and view project ideas at http://ctmaideas.ncms.org.  Add your comments to new project ideas and indicate your interest in helping to define and participate in the project.

We appreciate your feedback. Please contact Chuck Ryan with suggestions or input on other topics that would be of interest to you in this newsletter. The CTMA Program is sponsored by the Department of Defense; the content of this newsletter does not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the government; no official endorsement should be inferred.


Copyright 2006
National Center for Manufacturing Sciences