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New Focus on Operational Readiness and Logistics for Raytheon Technical Services
Raytheon intends to capitalize on its long and varied experience of providing maintenance and support services to its customers, offering more agile, more efficient and smarter support over the entire product range. Sue Baumgarten, newly appointed vp and deputy general manager of Raytheon Technical Services Company (RTSC), says that the company “has recognized a need to focus on operational readiness and logistics” and to bring its background in network-centric military communications to bear on support problems.
Target opportunities include the Army’s Future Combat Airlifter, where Raytheon has teamed with EADS to offer the EADS-CASA CN-235 transport as a replacement for Shorts C-23 Sherpas and a variety of other aircraft.
“Ideally, our business can offer power-by-the-hour, airlift-by-the-pound,” says Baumgarten. “It’s a commercial model, adapted for use in the theater. We’re not selling spares, we’re selling capabilities.”
Better support can pay off for the military by reducing the number of people and the tons of materiel that have to be deployed for an expeditionary operation. “The old notion is that you need x number of fighter aircraft to support a location,” says Baumgarten, “and that you need x-plus-one number of radars.” The result is that spares stockpiles grow in every location.
The process of improving the situation starts with more reliable products, such as the APG-79 active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar that Raytheon is developing for the Super Hornet. The AESA eliminates two major single-point failures from the radar — the antenna drive and transmitter. “You don’t want it to break, and if it does break you don’t want to take it out of the aircraft,” says Baumgarten. The AESA is designed so that most parts can be replaced on the aircraft. Smarter systems are designed with autonomic logistics: sensors monitor temperature, vibration and other parameters and predict when something is about to fail.
Raytheon’s definition of support combines logistics — spares and repairs — with mission support, such as the processing of sensor data on the ground. That is an area where Raytheon has had long experience, says Baumgarten. “We have been processing satellite information for many years,” she says, referring to the former E-Systems and its long ties to the intelligence community. Raytheon also plays a major role in managing imagery and signals intelligence from the U-2. “We can pull together the entire breadth of our platforms,” says Baumgarten, “including space, the U-2 and Global Hawk.”
Overall, says Baumgarten, the goal is to bring together both physical and mission support to deliver capability to the customer. “We want to look across all our major businesses; we want to work with our customers to focus on factory-to-foxhole lifecycle support; and we want to infuse that into everything we do.” —Bill Sweetman
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