Reliability, Maintainability, and Supportability: Best Practices for Systems Engineers

13Design for Supportability

13.1 WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THIS CHAPTER

The material we present in this chapter supports execution of the prescription we consistently advocate: pay attention to sustainability engineering at the early stages of system design so that better results may be achieved at lower cost. Good supportability promotes customer satisfaction and supplier profitability by decreasing the amount of time it takes to recover from failures, decreasing the burden on maintenance staff, and increasing system availability. Some important factors influencing supportability were reviewed in Section 12.2.2. This chapter discusses several useful practices that provide a quantitative foundation for enhancing supportability. These practical techniques form the core of design for supportability. Many of these quantitative techniques may also be extended to optimize their application. The decision whether to take the extra time and resources to carry out this optimization rests, as usual, on a balance of prevention and external failure costs.

Coverage of modeling and optimization for all relevant supportability techniques is beyond the scope of this book, but we use this chapter to show how some important supportability issues may be addressed with quantitative modeling. As always, the depth to which techniques like these are applied is dictated by the economics of the system and its total life cycle cost picture. Products that become obsolete very quickly, are low value, or otherwise ...