By Geoff Fein
The Navy is looking at a variety of ways to cut down on the number of components it buys for surface ships to help lower the cost of ship construction, a service official said.
The two biggest varieties of components in the fleet are circuit breakers and valves, Rear Adm. Charles Goddard, program executive officer (PEO) ships, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
“When we looked at this, we said there has got to be some things we can do,” he added.
One idea the Navy is reviewing is allowing the Naval Inventory Control Point Mechanicsburg, Pa., to put in place commodities contracts, Goddard said.
Naval Inventory Control Point Mechanicsburg is to select a couple of valves, motors and pumps and then allow companies to tap into those vendors, he said.
Those are going to be procurement vehicles that are in place [so] that if the Navy needs a particular size and type of pump, the service can use the contract to find the item. “It won’t necessarily be single source, probably two different sources, so you continue to get competitive pricing,” Goddard said.
“That is one of the things Chris [Deegan, director of cost, engineering and industrial analysis at Naval Sea Systems Command] and I learned when we benchmarked. You don’t go down to a single source unless it’s absolutely necessary, which means your economic quantity is so low it doesn’t support two,” he added.
The other effort was a project Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) did for the National Shipbuilding Research Program (NSRP). NSRP was created by U.S. shipyards at NAVSEA. The organization is structured as a collaboration of 11 major shipyards looking to reduce the cost of building and maintaining U.S. Navy warships, according the NSRP website.
“One of the projects that we did for them is called the common parts catalog,” Goddard said.
The shipyards all have part numbers for the different parts they use in ships, and because they have their own unique parts, they also have their own local parts numbers, so the Navy couldn’t even look across shipyards to find parts, he said.
“What we asked them to go do is come up with a common catalog that they could all agree to and sign up to and put all of their parts in,” Goddard said. “We had them go do that, and once [they] did that, we could go and look across and one of the things we started to do, we incentivized them.”
NAVSEA asked the shipyards to look at the parts catalog before they tried to list a new part in it. “See if you can use something there that is close to your need so that you are not generating a new part,” Goddard explained.
Had the Navy not developed the common parts catalog, shipbuilders would have been looking at roughly 25,000 parts of DDG-1000. With the adoption of the list, the shipyards are currently at a little more than 15,000 parts right now, he added. “We saw this same type of behavior on Seawolf and Virginia,” he added.
Seawolf has 70,000 to 80,000 unique parts, Deegan said. “On Virginia, it’s around 20,000 unique parts.”
The shipbuilder efforts have reduced valves by 22 percent and circuit breakers by 37 percent.
The change has all occurred since Goddard and Deegan finished their study more than a year ago.
“So there is some proof you can do this,” Goddard said. “You are not going to change those populations overnight because it is what it is.”
Besides PEO Ships, PEO Submarines and PEO Carriers participated in the effort. The common parts catalog is sponsored by all three PEOs, Goddard noted.
“You will see submarine parts on DDG-1000. Part of it is also driven by the requirements. DDG-1000 has a fairly significant acoustic requirement so instead of inventing a new pump, they are going to use some submarine pumps,” he said. “They are already proven and they are quiet.”
Additional savings are achieved, Goddard added, by not having to go through some types of qualification testing.
“You eliminate the need to do all of those things in order to introduce that part into the ship,” Goddard said. “You have to do sparing analysis of it and then decide what you are going to spare for that [part] to go repair it. So you save all that engineering analysis, plus it’s already in there in sufficient numbers so you don’t have to go buy spares, unless you are going to keep them on the ship. But you don’t have to get spares into the Navy supply system. So there is an incredible amount of savings with every one of these parts.”