Material condition assessments are a requirement in the advance planning phase of the maintenance availability process or as a self-assessment maintenance requirement within the Preventive Maintenance System. In either case, OPNAV Instruction 4790.4, Ships Maintenance and Material Management (3-M) Manual, requires that guidance documentation for the conduct of an assessment be in a maintenance requirement card (MRC) format.
During the course of a Chief of Naval Operations or major type commander availability, equipment components and systems are tested. Naval shipyards and supervisors of shipbuilding usually use locally developed test procedures. Ship's force and fleet maintenance activities use various specified forms from volume 5 of Commander-in-Chief Atlantic Fleet/ Commander-in-Chief Pacific Fleet Instruction 4790.3, Joint Fleet Maintenance Manual. Both methods support the gathering of objective evidence for assessment and analysis.
Throughout the Navy, there are a significant number of activities engaged in conducting inspections, certifications, assessments, and visits (ICAVs). Each activity generally uses technical information (e.g., 3-M MRCs, technical manuals, and system operability test procedures) or locally developed check sheets to guide their actions. Consequently, these IC"s are stand-alone events that use different check procedures that are duplicative of other activities. This is frustrating to our officers and sailors because different requirements arrive with each agency that comes on board. The situation is exacerbated when the training community uses similar local check sheets that significantly overlap with the material condition assessment community.
The Navy's current method of data-warehousing equipment material history is through the Maintenance Data Collection System (MDCS) portion of the 3-M program. Completed work is captured on an OPNAV 4790/2K form, which is archived at the Naval Sea Logistics Center, Mechanicsburg. Information is retrievable by ship class, ship, system, or component. To record this effort, both the 3-M Manual and the Joint Fleet Maintenance Manual direct the use of the OPNAV 4790/2K form to document material discrepancies and accomplishment of work.
As one can quickly conclude from the foregoing, material assessments are not standardized; therefore, the data derived from those assessments may or may not be helpful to decision makers and may not even accurately describe material condition in the correct format for analysis. The documentation of material condition with the OPNAV 4790/2K form is inconsistent. When there are configuration changes, the use of the OPNAV 4790/CK form also is not consistent. Although MDCS has a large warehouse of data, the OPNAV 4790/2K is not structured to capture material condition history (objective evidence at the system or component level), making it difficult to mine for assessment or analysis. Finally, because of the stovepipe nature of ICAV activities, there is no single database that contains the amalgamated assessment results from all these activities.
The Board of Inspection and Survey recently briefed the Fleet Review Board on a concept for standardizing the conduct of material condition assessments to enhance both the assessment process used by activities conducting these assessments and the self-assessment process that commanding officers use to manage their command maintenance program. Specifically:
- Standard assessment procedures would be established for use by ship's force and all other activities that would be exactly the same.
- The procedures automatically would create OPNAV 4790/2Kand CK forms to document objective evidence in a structured, configuration-driven format.
- A central repository would be created for standardized warehousing of material history data to support all stakeholders and customers.
The benefits of this standardization process would be:
- A standard, fleet-wide view of ship material condition that supports development of a common set of metrics for maintenance resource budgeting and allocation decisions.
- A universal material condition assessment process across the fleet based on standardized objective evidence.
- Improved accuracy and drill-down detail in material condition data.
- Improvements in existing data collection processes rather than starting from scratch.
- A continuum of assessment process improvement through a feedback loop to the technical and maintenance community.
- Warehousing of all fleet material condition data in a single database that can be accessed easily and rapidly.
The standardization process would proceed along three parallel paths by defining the data element structure for input and output, defining the material condition hierarchical structure model for all ship classes, and transitioning the check sheet to a standardized assessment procedure with an objective discrepancy description and statistical essential data element section.
Currently, there are three other important initiatives for the improvement of the Navy maintenance process. These are the material condition metrics working group, the integrated ship maintenance and supply review program, and the enterprise resources program. As directed by the Chief of Naval Operations, the material condition assessment standardization process will be integrated with these efforts to streamline and reduce duplication in the interdeployment training cycle and the fleet maintenance process. Ultimately, it will improve the quality of service of our sailors as well as the combat readiness of the fleet.
Captain Garrett is Commanding Officer of the Board of Inspection and Survey, Pacific, and Captain Chesterman serves as the board’s Chief Engineer.