Achieving affordable readiness in naval aviation maintenance through the acquisition and management of ATE and TPSs-opportunities and challenges

Operations and support (O&S) costs account for between 50 and 60% of the Navy's Total Obligation Authority (TOA). Affordable Readiness is the primary means by which the Navy will reduce these costs to create savings for investments in recapitalization and modernization of operational capability necessary to perform our mission. Affordable readiness is a business practice with four interrelated elements: flexible sustainment; sustained maintenance planning; total cost of ownership; and rightsourcing. Our challenge in the Automatic Test Systems (ATS) community is to engage in this process to provide a capability such that when avionics reliability requires it, intermediate level support is an effective and affordable support solution. We must, however, re-engineer our business processes to support affordable readiness in the Navy to ensure the products we provide meet our customers requirements. This paper will translate the business processes of acquiring and managing automatic test equipment (ATE) and test program sets (TPSs) into the four elements of affordable readiness and a cohesive vision of the future, while highlighting the opportunities end challenges confronting Government managers and our industry partners.