Supporting smarter land systems
We help you realise benefit at all stages of the life cycle. Our success comes from taking an end to end view of the supply and support chain so that solutions are streamlined and cost effective through life.
We help you realise benefit at all stages of the life cycle. Our success comes from taking an end to end view of the supply and support chain so that solutions are streamlined and cost effective through life.
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Our professional services cover the full spectrum of land system requirements across all Defence Lines of Development (DLoD) and the project life cycle, including acquisition strategy, design support and assessment to maintenance and through-life costs. Working with governments and industry, we support a high value, diverse and complex equipment portfolio.
We often review large fleets of vehicles and ranges of equipment with multiple variants, thereby enhancing your ability to predict life costs and accurately build confidence in your decision-making.
We bring an end-to-end view from analysis through Design and Delivery and In-Service Support to Disposal to build a more accurate picture of cost and value.
Our solutions which use the latest technology, are backed by in-depth knowledge of the wider land-based stakeholder group and a significant portfolio of engagements.
Above all, we work flexibly, responding as priorities evolve, focusing on delivering the outcome, not the plan, and quickly capturing new opportunities our iterative approach creates.
Only when you consider the totality of a complex system can you be sure you have identified and defined all potential sources of technical risk, cost increase or time delay.
Our holistic requirements engineering approach sees us explore, analyse, negotiate, and define user and system requirements to give you a comprehensive specification of your needs. This broad perspective allows for complex linkages to be maintained between user and system requirements. As advisors, we are helped by our independence from external shareholders or manufacturing interests, giving us an objective perspective.
We create a structured and auditable evidence base to make clear, concise, and timely decisions with confidence that requirements can be met within performance, budget and time constraints. Integrated management and modelling tools help avoid wasted time, and a through-life approach helps identify potential risks early.
We develop and refine candidate system architectures at all levels to validate requirements and test assumptions, presenting requirements in a clear architecture that shows interrelationships. We develop robust and comprehensive functional and non-functional specifications based on these candidate architectures, providing evidence to support engineering decisions and undertake technology management and planning to support the realisation of the requirements.
We help you navigate your options to make informed, supportable decisions on what will deliver the best possible value for money in use whilst providing the required performance of your asset.
Which option best balance’s reliability and cost drivers to improve reliability, reduce downtime and improve availability? Which option will reduce your cost of ownership whilst increasing your assets resilience and safety? Which opportunity will allow you to move from reactive to predictive maintenance, armed with a minimum safe and defensible scheduled maintenance strategy?
We help you answer these questions with confidence, whatever your asset life stage. We help you to identify design shortfalls correctly, influence design improvements, build a more effective repair process and robust support and supply chain.
‘Feasibility’ should assure you that all cost risks and drivers of cost are identified. We support you in making value for money decisions that minimise non-value-added activities and identify the lowest cost value-added activities. Our proactive approach to cost management helps you navigate choices confidently, staying focused on reduced time to market and increased overall profitability.
We apply Target Costing, Activity Based Costing, Cost as An Independent Variable (CAIV) and Value Management Techniques to reduce project cost by focusing specifically on the design and manufacture of the product or service and then considering what alternative approaches can be adopted. We ensure the model outputs we deliver are realistic and error-free and incorporate sensitivity analysis better to understand the resilience of preferred courses of action.
To do all of this and do it transparently, we are helped by our independence from manufacturing and other interests. That independent status not only guarantees you an objective view but also translates into valuable support in cost challenges and price negotiations.
Requirements and how they are met in the design need to be fully understood so that critical decisions can be made early in the programme and value for money can be achieved. As part of this, possible trades need to be identified to ensure that capability requirement is met, the chosen design is suitable for construction within the constraints of available technology, and resources and costs are available and affordable.
In-service support activities are often not considered adequately during the design phase, resulting in the cost and duration of support activities being driven upwards. Our design teams have a wide range of experience across the lifecycle of an asset can consider support activities as the design is developed. Thus, the design is optimised to enable support activities.
We are ideally placed to conduct design assurance activities, support the maintenance of design intent through life, and develop system or equipment design change solutions.
We can provide independent engineering design services. Technical assurance of our outputs is central to our methodology, supports decision-making, and reduces the risk of re-work and delays.
Maintaining design intent through life is a challenge. The importance is often lost in the pressures of delivering during the in-service phase, which can have serious safety implications and drive inefficiencies in the delivery of in-service availability, driving up in-service support costs.
We have a full range of capabilities for post-design services, ranging from the development of in-service support solutions to those services, including the provision of design changes, authoring technical documentation and provision of configuration management services.
We guide selection with impartial advice and provide robust risk assessments, technical options, feasibility assessments, cost systems and well-defined and measurable service level agreements.
Our in-depth knowledge of the defence environment enables us to apply cutting-edge thinking and technology solutions to complex defence projects. Not being directly involved in manufacturing or construction can provide an independent view across all activities. Our services range from supporting improvements at the policy level to assisting governments and their suppliers in responding effectively to safety and environmental issues associated with specific projects.
Realising a design or providing in-service through-life support cannot happen without a structured and managed delivery programme.
To accept or not? The sheer complexity of a platform, the number of stakeholders involved, tight timeframes, challenging cost, and performance constraints: can all undermine your confidence in accepting a new capability.
To help you fully understand and mitigate the risks, we have used our experience of defence acquisition projects to develop critical techniques to give you the confidence you have fully understood and mitigated any risks.
Our process sees us work to identify all stakeholders in accepting a system, the critical evidence required to base decisions, the standard to be applied and the risks that may impact the programme, its cost, quality, and capability. We translate this understanding into an acceptance strategy and a robust Integrated Test Evaluation and Acceptance Plan (ITEAP), which flags potential acceptance risk early.
Acceptance is not just a technical activity; it is about communication and interaction too. We provide maximum engagement with all stakeholders throughout a project, helping to manage expectations and reduce acceptance risk.
Pressure to deliver operational availability applies whether accepting a new platform or supporting changes to requirements or user needs. We bring a detailed understanding of performance characteristics, together with tailored and effective data collection and analysis tools, to manage the time and cost involved in acceptance.
We develop and implement the processes and services you need to measure the performance of your asset against its requirement and specification.
We provide Through-Life Support, or ‘Integrated Logistics Support’ across a range of engineering and technical domains to support pre-and post-delivery logistics for new or modified assets.
We help you realise performance, availability, reliability, cost, and schedule improvements through effective maintenance management systems. Our management and consulting abilities help you develop, implement, execute, and sustain these systems at a fleet and individual asset level.
As well as on-site Availability Project Management for asset construction and modification, we support maintenance management in two key ways:
Asset Planning sees us design and develops maintenance programmes covering FMECA (failure modes affects criticality analysis), LORA (level of repairs analysis), maintenance task analysis, and condition monitoring and trending.
Our deep technical understanding of complex legacy platforms across all platform design disciplines allows us to understand and develop disposal or sales solutions as platforms reach the end of their useful life.
From disposal or developing design change solutions to enable selling on a platform to another user or developing end-of-life disposal solutions (e.g., Green Passports), our engineers bring a comprehensive range of skills to deliver affordable and timely solutions.
We apply human factors engineering principles to the design and improvement of complex technical systems to optimise the human component of capability.
We are world leaders in managing reliability and retaining or restoring your technical assets to the necessary condition when carrying out maintenance.
We support the safety of your resources, including setting safety requirements, identifying hazards, assessing risks, ensuring compliance, and providing assurance through the production of safety case artefacts.
Integrating cutting edge organisational and behavioural insights to enhance performance, our innovative training consultancy supports the development of pro-active, professional, and highly skilled personnel within a regulated environment.
