PLCS Statement of Technical Requirements. Technical Requirements Product Life Cycle Support. Configuration Management, страница 7

3.3.8  Maintainer Reports and Requests

PLCS will provide a capability to capture and communicate reports of requests from maintainers, regarding problems, issues or improvements to the product support and design

3.3.9  Parts Properties and Classification

PLCS will provide a capability to capture and exchange the information needed to identify and describe all parts of the product to be held as spares.  Opportunities for using ISO 13584-42 (PLIB) will be fully explored.

3.3.10  Intended Spares Holdings

PLCS will provide a capability to define the intended holdings and location of spares required for maintenance.

3.3.11  Product Operating and Maintenance History

PLCS will provide a capability to hold and exchange specified aspects of product operating history of direct relevance to maintenance (e.g. hours run).  Opportunities for extending capability in this area will be explored with the Japan/Korea PWI Process Plant Operations & Maintenance project (SC4 document  N278).

4.  BUSINESS AREA ANALYSIS

This section provides further analysis of the business and information requirements from the viewpoint of the four business areas identified by the AP content diagram.

4.1  Support Engineering

4.1.1  What is Support Engineering?

The objective of Support Engineering is to maximise the operational availability of a product while minimising the through life cost of ownership of a product. Since much of that cost is “locked in” during the design phase, it may be worth investing significant effort, from the earliest stages of development, to minimise through life costs.  This can be achieved by improving the product design and by effective design and planning of the intended means of support.

Once the product has entered service, planned provision of support can be based upon the predicted reliability and expected life of its component parts. In-service experience will validate or challenge these predictions.  Where predictions are found to be significantly in error, it may be cost effective to initiate changes, either to the product design, or to the support system, to control or eliminate the emergent causes of poor availability or high support costs.

The requirement for Support Engineering can, therefore, best be defined by considering these phases of the product life cycle separately.

4.1.2  Support Engineering during Product Development (Initially and for changes).

4.1.2.1  Requirement Capture

The Support Engineer needs a clear statement of the functional requirement for the proposed product from which a performance metric can be derived in order to verify operational acceptability.  This statement must be sufficiently precise to enable shortfalls in performance to be readily identified and the significance of the shortfall to be assessed.   Some components may be over specified for their assigned task. In this case, under performance against the component design specification, need not be assessed as a failure.

The Support Engineer also needs know the required supportability characteristics of the product.  Supportability characteristics may be expressed in many ways (e.g. product life, required availability, reliability and maintainability, time to repair, mean time between overhauls or target maintenance man hours).

4.1.2.2  Operating Context or Usage Scenario

To optimise the support solution, the Support Engineer will require a set of assumptions for the expected usage of the product.  These may be recorded, for use in optimisation algorithms.  The Operating Context will define such details as:

·  nature of the operational environment;

·  length of the operating cycle between support opportunities;

·  capability and availability of support staff;

·  typical pipeline times for the delivery of spares from the various storage points in the supply chain;