Defence Support Services for the Royal Navy: The Context of Spares Contracts

“Defence Support Services” (DS2) for the Royal Navy are a particular form of “Product-Service Systems” (PSS). PSS deliver on a turn-key basis equipment/system with related spare parts, training and upgrades to the Royal Navy. In order to stimulate and reward the DS2 provider to improve its services and performance, the Royal Navy wants to shift its contracts from “traditional spare part deliveries” to “performance based contracts” such as “Contracting for Availability” (CfA). However, it has been observed that cost wise, CfA is not logical for all types of complex engineering projects. CfA typically faces higher risks and uncertainties from the solution provider in the early phases of the life cycle (e.g. design phase). There are difficulties in projecting the future costs and required resources in the bidding stage of the contract for the service provider e.g. Obsolescence and required trained workforce for a new introduced technology. These aspects have led some practitioners to prefer spare parts based contracts rather than adopting CfA. However, spare part contracts also have challenges, such as the service provider may not be responsible for the end-to-end process of delivering the support service, and limited time and penalties can cause issues for delivering the service. Moreover, given an extended number of possible solutions, support service providers need an insight from different parts of the supply chain about the cost and time perspectives. This chapter contributes by presenting two novel solutions in spares based contracts including a process to trade-off between time and cost across the supply chain and a framework to assess the costs and benefits of applying “Additive Manufacturing” in the front-end of a DS2 system. Lead time and overall cost are the two main dependent variables across the supply chain. Minimising them lead to a better service delivery. However, there are some challenges for minimising the lead time and overall cost in the supply chain.