Design for improved maintenance of the fiber-optic cable system

The author describes a number of maintenance improvements in the Fiber Optic Cable System (FOCS). They were achieved during a production phase pilot concurrent engineering program. Listed in order of importance (saved maintenance time and material) by maintenance level, they are: (1) organizational level: improved fiber optic converter (FOC) BITE; (2) Intermediate level: reduced FOC adjustments from 20 to 2; partitioned FOC into electrical and optical parts; developed cost-effective fault isolation test points and test using standard test equipment; improved FOC chassis to have lower mean time to repair; and (3) depot level: revised test requirements documents (TRDs) for common automatic test equipment and incorporated ATE testability into circuit and assemblies and application-specific integrated circuits. These improvements met this contract´s tailored logistics MIL-STD 1338-1A requirements of monitoring the design for supportability and determining the most effective support equipment. Important logistics lessons learned while accomplishing these maintainability and supportability improvements on the pilot concurrent engineering program are also discussed