26 Oct
2005
26 Oct
'05
10:28 a.m.
At 07:06 AM 10/26/05 -0700, Sellam wrote:
On Fri, 21 Oct 2005, Tony Duell wrote:
If you can prove that your repair business model would be more successful
than the one that has evolved over time in the electronics industry then
you should write a book and become a consultant and make millions. Why
waste your breath with a bunch of geeks like us?
Actually I HAVE done the analysis (in APL yet!) and there definitely IS a
place for board swapping. Especially when you consider the down time of the
system and the cost of extra systems when you HAVE to have a system in
operation (specificly in Air Defense!) I ran a simulation for the Canadian
DND (Department of National Defence) which showed that a 3 level repair
concept was THE most cost effective and yielded the maximum UP time. There
are a LOT more factors involved here than what Tony realizes. You have to
include things like stocking ALL of the parts and manuals at the more (and
multiple!) forward areas, also training all of those personel in
specailized things like repairing 7 layer circuit boards, providing very
advanced test equipment including in our case numerous optical test beds
mounted in air ride semi trailors. All together we looked at something like
40 different factors for a couple of thousand items AND all of the
interactions. (That's why we used APL. It's great for matrices!)
I think one thing that Tony forgets is that VERY few people are as
skilled as he is. I know the repairmen in the Canadian Army are much more
skilled than the ones in the US Army but even they wouldn't attempt the
kinds of things that Tony routinely does and four years is simply not
enough time to teach the skills necessary to do component level repair,
much less troubleshooting, on EVERYTHING. And in many cases those specific
failures happen so seldom that no one is likely to maintain the knowledge
and skills for every possible repair.
* Field: PM and board swapping by system operator based on BIT.
Depot: board and LRU level repair at special facilities. One in North
America and one in Europe for high and medium failure rate items
Factory level: for items with critical alignments, very difficult repairs
and items with low failure rates.
If you're interested, here what I worked on
<http://www.army-technology.com/projects/adats/>. I was responsible for all
of the Electro-Optical Guidance System (the barrel looking thing with the
windows sitting between the missiles) and a large part of the Turret
Electronics.
Now that you've peaked my interest I'm going to go see if I still have
that analysis around here. It was quite a piece of work if I do say so myself.
Joe
Boardswapping has a place and is a legitimate part of the history of
computers going way, way back. It is how things were and are done, and
I have never found 'that's the way things are done' to be a sufficient
reason for carrying on doing them that way.