SHIPMAIN Sustainment System Showing Success
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DefenseTalk reports that the figures for Pearl Harbor-homeported surface ships seem to show that they’re in better material condition than in the past, due in large part to Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard’s (PHNSY) use of SHIPMAIN tools and philosophies. Short for “Ship Maintenance,” SHIPMAIN is a Navy-wide initiative to streamline surface ship maintenance and modernization.
One of the major innovations of SHIPMAIN is the setup of dedicated maintenance teams for each ship…
The maintenance team members are permanently assigned to the team and are drawn from the ship, shipyard and other organizations, planning, assigning and doing the work. The shipyard has six teams, each handling two of the dozen ships homeported here. Then there are the Regional Maintenance Team (RMT) who support them. Located within the Yard’s Surface Ship Type Desk, Code 1216, the RMT provides common core services, such as budget administration, funding authorization, and developing, implementing and overseeing SHIPMAIN-related training and initiatives.
The shipyard was at the forefront in instituting SHIPMAIN in several areas, including ship’s force training, maintenance team and planning board stand-ups, data capture for metrics and business plan development. The yard was the first to incorporate use of the Maintenance Figure of Merit (MFOM), for instance, a tool to help teams decide what jobs should be done first. Another ongoing effort strives to bring together the many Shipyard and SHIPMAIN policies and instructions. These are being developed into local business rules and procedures that are being combined into easily understood handbooks for maintenance teams to follow.
PHNSY notes that material condition and the average age of casualty reports (CASREPs) has been gradually improving, and that SHIPMAIN has also decreased shipboard repair times, depite tighter maintenance budgets. At present, none of their ships have missed a deployment date.
