What does Mission Ready mean?
At Reliance we define components, systems and technology as being mission ready when they must work first time, every time no matter what the operational circumstances or environment. Implicit in this definition is the importance of evaluating, understanding and engineering the resilience of essential features and functionality to ensure that operational uncertainty and risk is either eliminated or nullified.
What is Resilient Thinking?
Resilient Thinking is the approach we take at Reliance to fully understand our customers’ requirements and needs and to subsequently understand how satisfying those needs delivers competitive advantage. It is about anticipating the unexpected – understanding what that might look like and then using our world class know-how and expertise to engineer a way through, so that the component, sub-assembly or assembly operates exactly as it was intended and designed to, without fail. For us, this is the Customer Value Proposition that we aim to deliver on.
How do we ensure that a critical system is Mission Ready?
When our engineers design for mission ready applications, success often hinges on one deceptively simple concept – the ability to ask the right questions early and often, in order to fully understand and subsequently define true functional performance requirements. It is at this point that resilience begins to be designed in and yet, in pressured situations where time-to-market is increasingly important, key questions can often be overlooked and consequently inappropriate assumptions can be made.
In pressured situations where time-to-market is increasingly important, key questions can be overlooked and consequently, inappropriate assumptions can be made.
This article explores Resilient Thinking as an approach to building critical systems and how – when executed effectively – it can mitigate risk, improve performance and ultimately ensure mission success.
Why is Resilient Thinking so important?
The global defence industry is complex and very much technology driven. The demand for more advanced defence systems with greater accuracy and speed, longer range and more effective delivery continues to grow. These requirements ultimately define the effectiveness of a given system and while threats evolve, mission requirements continue to be honed. The pursuit of enhanced system capability and performance drives requirements for world class design and manufacturing capabilities along with the use of exotic and sometimes challenging materials.
Defence systems operate in high-stakes, complex environments. Components and sub-systems must not only be ready for these conditions, but they must also integrate seamlessly and comply with rigorous standards. A missed question, an inaccurate assumption, one single oversight can lead to catastrophic failure.
International defence projects involve many stakeholders and historically take several years in a development cycle before they are proven and deemed ready to enter into service. But this is changing. For instance, the realisation that European countries should be spending more on defence in order to defend themselves has led to a significant ramp up in production volumes. At the same time, the need to keep up with the latest technologies has seen speed-to-market become more important than ever before. The word ‘resilience’ has become the new ‘innovation’ and while innovation remains key in this arena, resilience and the certainty of success has become critical.
‘Resilience’ has become the new ‘innovation’ and while innovation remains key in this arena, resilience and the certainty of success has become critical.
‘Time-to-market’, ‘time to ramp up production’ and ‘time to replenish armaments’ are all phrases that we are hearing on repeat. As timeframes become compressed, the need for resilient technologies, resilient supply chains and Resilient Thinking becomes increasingly acute.
Increasingly, the challenge becomes: how can we deliver resilient systems in much shorter timeframes than we are used to and how can primes like MBDA, Leonardo and BAE Systems build resilient supply chains that can withstand, adapt to and recover quickly from disruption?
No single organisation has either the capability or capacity to address this issue. It is a complex situation that is only compounded on international programmes where multiple stakeholders are involved at any one time. It is apparent that even the best supply chain is only as strong as its weakest link and second sourcing is at the forefront of supply chain managers’ minds.
The answer is therefore multi-faceted, but perhaps the answer is for organisations to play to their strengths and work with strong, capable partners who bring complementary skills to the table. At Reliance, we recognise that our strength is our ability to build resilience into a component or sub-system from concept to production. Â Resilient Thinking is our approach to designing mission ready technology and it starts and ends with the customer.
Resilient Thinking in practice
As with many functional and performance attributes, it is best to design resilience into a technology from the outset of a project, considering the wider system from every conceivable angle and ideally from the very first steps of concept design into full NPDI and then into the production process. To do this later, and attempt to engineer resilience back in, would be like trying to put the genie back in the bottle once it has escaped when actually, the genie should never have been let out in the first place. Resilient Thinking is about asking the right questions to truly define the problem and understand technical, commercial and operational requirements, both explicit and implicit. It is about being clear on the problem(s) we are trying to solve. It is typically a three-stage process:
1. Understand and meet performance and reliability needs
Firstly, we aim to understand our customers’ requirements and needs for functionality, performance and reliability (system capability, if you will) and then we work to recognise the potential threats or risks to each of these requirements. Considering the wider context and operating regime of the system and the implications for either components or sub-systems is key to the successful design and development of resilient technology. We aim to understand:
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What are the absolute functional requirements? What does the component or sub-system need do and how it is expected to meet these requirements? How is it expected to perform throughout its life or when called into action?
What are the interface requirements? Where does this component or sub-system fit into the wider system? What impact will it have and how will the wider system impact it? Where is the weakest link in either sub-system or system? What happens to the wider system if the sub-system fails or underperforms?
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How does the component or sub-system contribute to the overall performance demands of the system? Does it need to be lighter or more robust?
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Are there options to innovate with alternate materials or alternate configurations? Are there new or even disruptive technologies that could be considered to meet the customer’s requirements while still delivering a resilient solution?
2. Apply a deep knowledge of technology in complex environments
It is critical to understand the environment a mission ready sub-system will operate in because this directly influences design choices, materials selection and manufacturing processes and methods. For example, any environment where the structure – and therefore the mechanical or thermal properties of a chosen material can be affected and modified – need to be understood and taken into account. Is the component or sub-system going to be exposed to extreme temperatures (high and low) or extreme pressures (high and low)? Is the environment corrosive? Will the sub-system withstand extreme vibration or electromagnetic influences? If the answer is ‘yes’ to any of these questions, what are the potential risks posed to the sub-system and how do we mitigate or nullify them through an engineered process?Â
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When we understand the answer to these questions, we can apply our engineering expertise and understanding of complex environment impact to develop a resilient solution that aligns with customer requirements.
3. Engineer opportunities for competitive advantage
In the Resilient Thinking approach, we aim to secure competitive advantage for the customer, not for ourselves. Possible sources of competitive advantage might include the speed-to-market of a new product where we can work at pace to develop a solution and transition seamlessly into full-scale production, within an agreed timeframe.
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Or perhaps achieving significant weight reduction over traditional designs, improved durability or increased longevity that maintains mission ready capability could be of interest? Even the importance of unit cost as a source of competitive advantage can be addressed at this point. We look to understand cost drivers such as material selection, methods of manufacture and tolerancing requirements. These options can be designed in or more importantly designed out when fully understood by our engineers.
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Understanding this aspect of the problem is as important as stages one and two for us. It’s the point at which we tailor our approach and apply our understanding and lessons learnt from previous work to a new set of customer requirements. Typically, it is the understanding gained from this part of the process that drives the creative or innovative element of the Resilient Thinking approach.Â
Conclusion
In defence, mission success relies on every part of a system and every element of a supply chain performing at its highest level. In a technology driven industry, innovation will always be key to success, but in an uncertain and everchanging world resilience has become increasingly critical.Â
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At Reliance Precision we have developed our Resilient Thinking approach – an approach that starts and ends with the customer – which enables us to design and engineer in our customer’s requirements from the outset, in order to mitigate or remove risk. If you’re looking for a resilient technology partner or simply want to learn more about our Resilient Thinking approach, please contact us. For more insights on the defence industry, visit the Resilient Thinking page of our website.
