Northrop Grumman's Digital Sustainment Tools to enhance Mission Readiness.

Sustainment is a vital element of any product’s lifecycle. Keeping systems operational and mission-ready requires a Digital Logistics Environment (DLE) — an ecosystem of applications, tools, and practices that utilize innovative digital capabilities to manage and track key elements of the sustainment system and operational support pipeline.
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Artist rendering of digital services (Picture source: Northrop Grumman)

Planners consider a multitude of data to customize and deliver successful sustainment support at the right time and place. To make informed decisions, each support function has to communicate and share data, so all team members have a timely, coherent picture of what is happening to the platform.

Model-based digital engineering and innovative technologies are also changing how legacy systems are maintained, repaired, overhauled, and upgraded now for the future to ensure mission readiness. Aging platforms naturally carry more maintenance program execution risk, as modifications and repairs made over that lifecycle may have altered the original configuration, making it challenging to conform to standard service requirements.

An integrated digital environment also enables planners to take a model-based approach to sustainment. The model can be used to spell out policies around what needs to happen and when to define certifications needed among sustainment personnel and organize the movement of parts and materials.

By tracking and providing real-time information, a DLE helps teams update their models as demand changes. This optimizes the entire support ecosystem to deliver greater value at less cost. This is especially helpful in supporting the sustainment of legacy systems, where replacement parts may be increasingly hard to come by.

Northrop Grumman's sophisticated enterprise intelligence and reporting tools tie all this together on the back end. These analytics capabilities give military planners the insights they need to support greater transparency and accountability because they can see the correlations, how data in one function relates to data in another area.

With greater transparency, planners can get ahead of sustainment. They can leverage digital tools to make preemptive decisions, drive predictive activities and add a higher level of resilience to mission-critical and time-sensitive sustainment activities. These capabilities deliver the transparency, efficiency, and performance needed to increase aircraft availability and enable mission success.