CHAPTER 1
PARTS MANAGEMENT CONTRIBUTIONS TO AFFORDABLE
SYSTEM OPERATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS
Parts Management Overview
In today's acquisition environment-characterized by rapidly changing designs and by in- creased risk for Department of Defense (DoD) weapons systems and equipment acquisition contracts due to an increased emphasis on the use of commercial part types, offshore manufac- ture of parts, Diminishing Manufacturing Sources and Material Shortages (DMSMS), counter- feit parts, and the use of lead-free parts-the need for contractors to have an effective Parts Management Program (PMP) is greater than ever before. The PMP is an integral part of the acquisition process for design, development, modification, and support of weapons systems and equipment.
Parts are the building blocks from which systems are created and, as such, greatly impact hardware dependability, readiness, and operating costs. Parts management is the practice of considering the application, standardization, technology (new and aging), system reliability, maintainability, supportability, and cost in designing or selecting parts and addressing availabili- ty, logistics support, DMSMS, and legacy issues in supporting them throughout the life of the systems. Because the reliability and maintainability of the end item is dependent upon these building blocks, the importance of selecting and applying the most effective PMP cannot be overemphasized.
Selecting, specifying, ensuring proper design applications, and, in general, managing parts used in complex systems constitute a major engineering task. As an important element of sys- tems engineering (SE), parts management streamlines the selection of preferred or commonly used parts during the design of weapons systems and equipment. Typically, the use of parts de- scribed by non-government standards (NGSs) or military standards or the use of commonly used parts already in the DoD supply system is preferred unless a business case analysis shows that a new unique part would have significant life-cycle cost or other advantages.
The parts management process identifies the optimum parts while considering all the factors that may affect program outcomes. Use of these optimum parts provides the ultimate user, the warfighter, returns that can be measured through enhanced reliability, maintainability, availabil- ity, economies of scale, and supportability. In turn, these factors enhance systems performance, logistics and operational readiness, and interoperability, while limiting the logistics footprint, logistics response time, cost per unit usage, and the total ownership costs of weapons systems and equipment.
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