Ship availability oriented contract management model for in-service support contracts of naval vessels

Abstract

The rapid development of the ship building and ship repair industry in recent years has transformed the way organizations perceive the future industry growth. Greater growth of naval technology is clearly noticed as well. Disappointingly, the worldwide phenomenon reflects that availability of naval vessels remained lower than expected. The Royal Malaysian Navy (RMN) vessels currently maintained under in-service support (ISS) contracts suffer the same fate, despite continuous yearly effort to improve the ships’ availabilities. The complexity of naval ship itself and its ever-changing roles and mission makes the situation more complex. Previous studies remained focused mostly on availability calculations and availability modelling of few factors only. There has not been any holistic study on all human and equipment factors impacting availability. The research aim is to demystify the complex naval ship availability issue by developing a decision-making model in improving ship operational availability of naval vessels under the ISS contract. Besides introducing a simplified view to the complex naval issue, this multiple-staged mixed-method sequential Delphi exploratory research has determined and ranked various downtime influence factors (DIFs) viewed holistically from both human and equipment perspectives, as well as determining the DIFs impact from the contract and project management perspectives. A panel of 30 experts and five top management experts in ISS contract in Malaysia participated in the research. 50 DIFs were identified, and a severity index (SI) was developed for each of the determined 15 severe DIFs. The developed SI highlights that almost 45% of the downtime causes are due to the top five severe DIFs with corrective maintenance (SI 0.142) ranked first, spares availability (SI 0.082) ranked second, cash flow shortages (SI 0.078), ranked third maintenance budget allocation ranked fourth (SI 0.075) and knowledge management including training and skills (SI 0.070) ranked fifth. In this study, an availability-oriented model has been developed to assist policymakers in decision making and for maintainers and logisticians in appreciating their individual contribution to improve availability. Contract managers are provided with a tool to better manage the contract at ‘close to real time’ with identified prioritization on severe issues added with recovery recommendation to improve the ongoing availability situation. The simple approach and model are more appealing to practitioners unlike previously where complex mathematical results and algorithms were made available. An interesting finding is that availability could be improved even with budget constraints.