The UK Navy RAMP Project: Improving the spares provisioning process through the rapid acquisition of manufactured parts

Abstract

This paper reports on a Naval Support Command (NSC) commissioned pilot study into the use of a ‘production-on-demand’ system to reduce the cost of spares provisioning. The system, known as RAMP (Rapid Acquisition of Manufactured Parts) is based around the electronic communication of component information using ISO STEP standards AP203 and AP224. STEP AP224 has been designed to communicate the information required for process plans to be generated for single-item mechanical parts that are to be manufactured by machining, and, given appropriate computer aided process planning (CAPP) software, can be used to automate or semi-automate the process planning task, offering considerable lead time savings to component manufacturers, and enabling ‘production on demand’. The RAMP process has been tested through the manufacture of nearly 600 components, all of which were UK Navy inventory components, with information regarding the speed and completeness of the process recorded at each stage. The scope and results of this pilot study are reported. It is concluded that the adoption of RAMP processes for UK Navy spares procurement is likely to provide a significant cost and time saving over current procurement processes, and that AP224 has the potential to become the standard mechanism for component information to be exchanged where process planning of mechanical parts to be manufactured by machining is required.