Procurement and delivery of required performance: Case study

摘要

A case study is presented pertaining to a performance based contract for the delivery of a specified capability and level of assurance (availability) for a fleet of assets. Increasingly, organisations are recognising that they need to focus on their core business rather than try to be best at everything. Thus operational service delivery organisations are concentrating their focus on how the asset is used rather than the technical details of how to make it available for service. This thinking better manages the potential conflict of interest between asset ownership and service delivery and allows the shift of asset availability risk to another party (eg. the builder or allied supplier). However, the purchase and delivery of a required performance regime brings with it new challenges for both the operator and the supplier of that capability. This paper will explore the technical challenges faced and their successful solution through a performance based contracting strategy requiring demonstration, early in the design and build stage, that required asset availability can be met. In particular the approach to progressively assure the design solution represents the risk expectations of both parties from the earliest stages through reliability, availability and maintainability modelling is explained. The use of such models, to achieve a common understanding of solution issues and to focus both parties attention on areas where effort would achieve both a technically and financially sustainable outcome for both, is explained.