Availability Contracting - a process by which defence contractors are paid according to the amount of time that an asset is available
Working with BAE Systems on their ATTAC programme (APMP Project of the year 2007), Richard Hartley assisted BAES teams with the implementation aspects of the equipment supply chain solution for the Tornado military aircraft.
Fixed price and availability contracts may be more common place in the civil aerospace environment, but recently they have also seen increasing use in the military arena. Transitioning legacy military platforms, and their support, to more cost efficient and improved availability methods has been the challenge of several MoD and Industry partnered initiatives in recent years, such as ATTAC (Availability Transformation - Tornado Aircraft Contract), HPAC (Harrier Platform Availability Contract) and more recently TAS (Typhoon Availability Support). The concepts are also now being applied to land vehicle support.
Arguably the biggest of the Aerospace availability projects in recent times has been ATTAC, not only by value but also complexity. ATTAC has presented many challenges to BAE Systems, and is widely accepted as their vanguard within the company for solution development and concept proving of military availability contracting. Richard was involved within the initial bid teams on ATTAC in 2006, and then through the transition and delivery phase, and unlike other consulting staff gained a longer and more in-depth exposure to the delivery pitfalls associated to such a contract. It became clear to Richard that even with the 'project' led team approach on ATTAC, the functional areas of the company generated disconnected knowledge that required a better overarching approach to problem solving. Linking the commercial and economic reasoning of solutions to the engineering and supply of the supporting assets - in essence, the definition of true Systems Engineering across disciplines - was the answer and an approach that he stressed in all dealings with the various teams. Only by this approach did it become possible to create and enact supply solutions, from upstream contract through to Aircraft line, with savings in the millions(£), and only then by focused partnered support from the MoD customer and the dependencies that they retained and supplied through the main ATTAC contract.
Further upstream, at the lower tier suppliers (working for BAES as a Prime), the story and the negotiation was much different, sometimes particularly complex, with methods of risk sharing and performance contracting required to ensure the MoD customers needs but within strict budget constraints generated by the main downstream contract. Richard was heavily involved, designing and writing availability based business agreements and conducting the negotiations of several supplier contracts totalling over £40m.
In addition to the Supplier contract negotiations and initial solution agreement, transitioning the various Suppliers operational capabilities into new ways of working such that they integrated and improved their individual contributions to the overall ATTAC solution became a key consideration, and one where many lessons were learnt.
One new aspect of this military maintenance contract was the move toward Military Maintenance Def Stan 05-130 accreditation (MAOS), a near equivalent to the civil EASA part 145 & M standards (more...). For this Richard brought his prior civil aerospace experience to bear having worked as an on-site support representative resident at Paris CDG airport, on civil aerospace wide body fleets. (more...)
Richard Hartley completed his MBA dissertation on the subject of availability contracting, in support of the BAE Systems ATTAC programme.
