Customer Problem:
A surveillance radar with outdated, proprietary computer hardware and software had limited performance and limited technical refresh capability, with much higher, long term maintenance costs. Use of proprietary systems had also led to decreased reliability, maintainability, and availability, rendering the radar ineffective, and/or inoperable at critical times, resulting in valuable data losses during execution of costly flight and ground test activities.
What INTUITIVE did:
The Value Engineering (VE) Team used the VE methodology to mitigate obsolescence of the signal data processing equipment utilized by the sensors. Efforts identified decommissioned government furnished equipment, which were inexpensively purchased from an alternate government agency and applied toward future builds of radars.
Impact:
The VE Program avoided major and costly redesign and accelerated the production and fielding of new radar units, as well as improved the availability of cost-effective radar components and assemblies resulting in a saving of over $116M.