PLCS Statement of Technical Requirements. Technical Requirements Product Life Cycle Support. Configuration Management, страница 5

·  the identification and properties of parts, including packaging, handling storage and transportation characteristics,

·  the information needed to procure parts, including details of alternative suppliers

·  the planned location of spares holdings.

The extent to which behaviour of the supply chain will be modelled (spares demands, delivery forecasts, transportation methods, actual stock levels, present location etc.)  has yet to be decided[2].

2.3  Configuration Management

Changes to the product configuration may change the maintenance and spares required.  Implementation of a change may be a maintenance task. PLCS will address the information needed to manage changes to the configuration of an existing product.

In addition, because of the high importance of the configuration structure to product information management, PLCS will also address the information needed to develop a configuration structure as part of the design activity and to manage changes to design.

PLCS will also provide a capability to determine what related items and information objects may be affected by a proposed or actual change.

Further details of the approach to Configuration Management are provided in Sections 4, 5 and 6.

2.4  Support Engineering

PLCS will define the information needed to develop and to optimise the support solution for the product, initially and during life. The information needed to achieve this includes:

·  Intended operating and maintenance scenarios

·  Supportability characteristics (required, forecast and actual)

·  Classification of maintainer skills

·  Policies and procedures for maintenance and supply

·  Intended support solutions (the required maintenance and supply activities)

·  The reasons for choosing support solutions (e.g. Level of Repair Analysis)

2.5  Other Information

This section identifies further information elements within the scope of the AP Content Diagram, but not directly linked to the critical activities above.

2.5.1  Feedback Required from Maintenance

PLCS will provide means to define the feedback that the maintainer is required to provide, including details of actions undertaken and reports on the state of the product.  This will enable the capture of data on failure rates, repair times, spares usage, man hours etc. as an input to Life Cycle costing.

PLCS is not at this point intending to provide a full capability to model life cycle costs, or to address issues of price or monetary value, except in relation to the purchase price of a spare.

2.5.2  Maintainers Reports and Requests

PLCS will provide a capability to communicate reports and requests from maintainers regarding problems or suggested improvements to product design or support.

2.5.3  Approval Data

PLCS will provide a capability to record the approval status of products and related information in terms of who approved, for what purpose, when and (if necessary) why.

2.5.4  Information Objects

PLCS will provide a capability to hold any kind of information object, related to the product structure, to the level of capability provided by the NATO CALS Data Model. Version 3.0.

3.  USE of the PLCS STANDARDS

3.1  Sharing and Exchange

The information model developed by the PLCS Initiative must be suitable for use in two different ways:

·  For implementation, in part or in whole, as an integrated product support database, providing shared access to life cycle data (the information sharing or data warehouse approach).

·  To provide a neutral format for exchanging agreed subsets of data between different databases, containing equivalent information (the information exchange approach).

A combination of these two approaches is likely to be needed in most practical cases.

3.2  Functionality of a Shared Database