OPERATIONS IMPROVEMENT

CASE STUDIES

Client: NAVAIR

Challenges:

This contract with NAVAIR required analysis for improvement in the program requirements reviews, standardization of training, and sustainment of warfighting capabilities. Specifically:

• Support of the annual program requirements reviews of the Sustainment Group’s Financial Management department—including an analysis of its program objective memorandum (POM) dataset against that of prior years—to document anomalies, improve efficiencies, and defend funding requirements tied to readiness impacts.
• Standardization of Reliability Control Board (RCB) training, to attain this commercial best practice’s core intent and establish standard operating procedures.
• Teaming with the Sustainment System Working Group (SSWG) and the Naval Aviation Enterprise (NAE) to Identify the top issues across the Navy and Air Force that negatively impact sustainment of warfighting capabilities, to improve the readiness of warfighting assets while reducing sustainment costs.

Solutions:

• For the programs requirements reviews, Sierra deployed high-level military program models, planning tools, a budget system, and analysis software to identify best practices; applied a holistic approach to data collection to ensure data quality, consistency, and integration; developed a process flow chart to match key areas in the annual cycle with definable processes and tasks; and created a desk guide to establish standard, repeatable processes resulting in increased efficiencies and reduced rework.
• To standardize training, Sierra worked with the Government project lead to develop a standard curriculum; initiated contact between the internal training team and outside subject matter experts to support learning objectives in data analytics, technology operations, and sustaining engineering; developed a training tracker to log contacts with stakeholders, course information, attendee information, and action items; and encouraged internal groups, offices, and PMAs to attend the new, standardized classes.
• Using Standard Naval Aviation metrics, Sierra is providing logistics oversight and subject matter expertise to the Sustainment System Working Group to address systemic issues that negatively impact readiness and cost; employing intensive root cause analysis and data-driven methodologies to discover and initiate new best practices; and has developed five problem statements to analyze for the best path to problem mitigation.

 Client Benefits:

• Improvement of requirements generation process and documentation, overseen from Day One by Sierra’s trained and qualified Senior Analyst, will be submitted to OPNAV for validation and resourcing.
• Development of a standardized training curriculum with relevant content increased attendance and greater training efficiencies. Starting in July 2020, NAVAIR has trained more than 400 individuals across ten standardized courses.
• Leveraging subject matter expertise and 30-plus years of real-world maintenance experience, Sierra’s Team Lead coordinated with senior leaders from multiple DoN Sustainment organizations to identify the top naval aviation sustainment issues and developed actionable solutions and recommendations for improvement within the Future Years Defense Program (FYDP)—critical to the success of the DoN Aviation Sustainment Working Group.