IDENTIFYING THE TRUE COST OF NO FAULT FOUND (NFF) WITHIN THE UNITED KINGDOM MINISTRY OF DEFENCE (MOD)

摘要

Availability is a key requirement for the Armed Forces yet the occurrence of faults where no attributable reason can be established still threatens to reduce the required availability and still causes nugatory maintenance effort. Such faults with no apparent cause are usually described in the UK as No Fault Found (NFF) and in USA as Retest OK (RTOK) or Can Not Duplicate (CND); their occurrence remains a huge and disruptive effect on the successful delivery of through-life customer support. Whilst commercially it causes huge loss of revenue, in the military environment, costs are often less obvious and hidden, yet may be much higher. This lack of visibility of the true cost is a worrying trend that must be tackled as the UK Armed Forces reduce in size as it will have a more significant operational and financial impact. A study of MOD's NFF occurrences has been conducted by the EPSRC Centre for Through-Life Engineering Services in order to establish more accurate costs and to establish the key reasons and causes. Whilst the study has so far concentrated on the air environment where information is most readily available, the research and lessons learned are applicable to other industries.