Digital Problem Resolution

Project Start: March 2018

The Digital Problem Resolution project, led by Huntington Ingalls Industries Newport News Shipbuilding (NNS), is focused on developing a process that will digitally capture growth work items for use and evaluation by problem resolution teams across In-Service Carrier (ISC) and New Construction (NC) aircraft carrier contracts.

NNS’s waterfront support engineering groups identified a struggle to properly identify growth work items, creating inefficiency and rework throughout the resolution process. Growth (unplanned) work is repair activities not identified, and therefore not budgeted for, during planning.  Growth work associated with carrier programs is inconsistent and causes major disruptions to cost and schedule goals. Knowledge about this growth work is not properly retained, and is lost between individual programs and team members. Retaining knowledge related to growth work resolutions, and using that knowledge to develop best practice solutions, can provide significant future savings from reuse. Savings could multiply when knowledge and best practice solutions are shared between shipyards.

The Digital Problem Resolution effort will develop a process for the CVN to capture and retain growth work items using digital information capture technologies. It will create a knowledge base to store identified resolutions for each growth work items. Engineering and planning personnel will contribute growth work resolutions, as best practice solutions, to the knowledge base.  Processes will be developed to exploit development of laser scanning solutions developed from the CVN Reality Capture ManTech project to increase fidelity of applicable growth work resolutions. Additionally, other forms of digital capture technologies will be evaluated during the project. This includes digital photographs and digital videos, to provide engineers and planners capability to identify an appropriate level of fidelity required for specific resolutions.

The project will be executed in two phases.  Phase I will survey end users to define the technical requirements for Knowledge Base system, digital capture technology and data storage/accessibility security.  Phase II will define the new problem resolution process and evaluate both the process and Knowledge Base in active contracts. Once implemented, the process improvement is estimated to provide a 5-year savings of $3.3M for Ford Class Aircraft Carrier across the ISC, NC, and Refueling and Complex Overhaul (RCOH) work.