In the maritime domain, CORDA has had a long relationship with the Type 45 destroyer programme. Some of the early work was with the MoD’s Type 45 project team in the Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S) agency, back in the early 2000s, looking at the whole life costs of the programme. The recent work has been with the BAE Systems Type 45 programme managers in Portsmouth. The recent emphasis of CORDA’s work has been with the “Future output management” team whose focus is on bringing in new approaches that will help manage availability across classes of ships. These approaches include a wider range of data on the ship’s performance and the analysis to exploit that information – CORDA’s focus is on the latter of these.
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IMPACT | SPRING 2015
Recent work includes helping the managers understand the issues around power and propulsion on the ships. A mixed team from BAE Systems Fleet Services and CORDA, analysed the power failure reports from the ships plus the more traditional OpDef (operational deficiency) returns. This analysis focused on looking for patterns in the data and using those patterns to predict the future volume of incidents based on the planned use of the class. This work has helped the Type 45 programme in a number of ways; it: • provides some objectivity to help focus decision making and debunk myths within the Type 45 community; • provides a way to build the benefits case for candidate interventions; • encouraged DE&S to start collecting slightly broader data for further analysis.
This, and other work that CORDA is doing, has helped strengthen the links between BAE Systems and DE&S and started to highlight the value that analysis can bring to both organisations.
HOW TO CROSS A BURNING DITCH
In the land domain, CORDA supported the British Army in developing its understanding of the future requirement for its battlefield obstacle breaching capability, and how it would meet this need. This work looked over the next 20 years to identify emerging capability gaps and ways of filling them. This provided both Dstl and the Army engineers with a long term vision of the focus of research, actions to take with training, logistics and doctrine, and ideas of where short term procurement funding would be best spent. BAE Systems provided a combined team of analysts from CORDA and engineers from Combat Vehicles (UK) who devised a novel method for identifying capability gaps which displayed the multiple relevant factors on one simple visualisation. From this visualisation, the team could provide the evidence required by Dstl. Both Dstl and the Army were engaged throughout the project to ensure that their views were fully accounted for. The results (a prioritised list of capability gaps and solutions – both simple and far-field) were presented at Major General level. This work has the potential for follow on work and gives BAE Systems the visibility of where breaching capability may go over the next 20 years. Obstacles that may require breaching could range from ditches to parked buses to minefields/IEDs
Image © BAE Systems 2015
CORDA CONTINUES SUPPORTING TYPE 45