NAVSEA Readiness: How to Get U.S. Warships Back to Sea Faster

The Problem of the Maintenance

The U.S. Navy acknowledges a problem with its ship maintenance cycles—specifically that maintenance periods are running too long, keeping critical assets in dock instead of on mission.

For example, the U.S. Navy has over 80 nuclear powered warships (NPWs)—submarines and aircraft carriers. These NPWs represent about forty percent of major U.S. naval combatants, and are vital to defending U.S. interests and those of our allies around the world.

All ships require maintenance, but NPWs bring “unique considerations for technical specifications and quality control, ship safety, radiological controls for occupational health and safety, and information security,” notes the Department of the Navy OPNAV INSTRUCTION 4700.7M. As such, “Navy policy dictates that most maintenance on nuclear-powered ships be performed by the four shipyards it owns and operates,” summarizes a 2021 Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Report on Nuclear Submarine Maintenance.

Maintenance Delays

However, there is a problem: “Those four public shipyards have experienced long delays—sometimes as long as several years—in performing maintenance on submarines. As a result, some submarines have missed deployments or had their deployments at sea shortened. The delays have reduced the number of submarines that the Navy can put to sea, idling expensive ships and their skilled crews.”

A New Approach to Speed Maintenance Cycles

Knowledge Relay proposes an innovative opportunity for improvement: Through our unique combination of software and data services, we can help the Navy:

• Generate more accurate maintenance schedules,
• Streamline data analysis and reporting on maintenance processes, and
• Shorten maintenance cycles with the same number of current workers.

How Can We Do It?

By uniting 40 years of commercial nuclear industry expertise, our unique separation of data layers, delivering scalable parallel processing, and improving automation.

Retired Navy professionals who run commercial nuclear outage maintenance programs can share how they have reduced their maintenance times from 36 days in 2000 to 25 days in 2020—building “best practices” in Project Controls data, visualization, data analysis, and reporting for managing safe, efficient nuclear power with the help of Knowledge Relay software and services.

Knowledge Relay can help improve the accuracy of all ship maintenance schedules and automate critical maintenance data to speed our ships back to sea!

Contact us today to start a discussion on how better data analysis and Project Controls can shorten Navy maintenance cycles.