A framework for evaluating the effects on Life Support Cost by design and support decisions

Abstract:

A recent trend in the world is that more and more countries and therefore their mil-itaries have made their spending more streamlined by considering the true cost of a system, also called its Life Cycle Cost. This has forced the defense industry to ad-opt the same way of thinking when developing their systems in order to stay competitive.

Electronic Defense Systems (EDS) is a business area within Saab, a Swedish defense com-pany, that has experienced this. Within EDS and its business unit Electronic Warfare (EW), the ILS-department (Integrated Logistics Support) is tasked with implementing this line of thinking within EDS. The ILS-department has seen the need for a greater leverage in the decision making process, both during product development and in the after sales market. In order to achieve this increased leverage, they saw the need for an evaluation tool to decrease Life Support Costs (LSC).

This thesis aims to create a tool to meet the demands of the ILS department and enhance their way of thinking by calculating the relevant costs and presenting them in a clear and comprehensive way, so that the finished LSC evaluation framework can be an e˙ective aid in the decision making process.

The main result of this thesis is a LSC evaluation framework that can show the impact of both small and large changes to the technical and/or support system on LSC. In order to do this, the LSC evaluation framework utilizes the OPUS suite software; OPUS10, Simlox and Catloc together with supporting documents. The end result is a delta model in order to compare di˙erent solutions. The delta model includes reference values for relevant costs that can be a˙ected by such changes.

Included is also two cases in which the model is used. The data shown during these cases have been altered to comply with confidentiality requirements.