Sustaining Engineering

According to Para 2.1.3 of the Product Support Manager (PSM) Guidebook, Sustaining Engineering is defined as “those technical tasks (engineering and logistics  investigations and analyses) to ensure continued operation and maintenance of a system with managed (i.e., known) risk. Sustaining Engineering involves the identification, review, assessment, and resolution of deficiencies throughout a system's life cycle. Sustaining Engineering both returns a system to its baselined configuration and capability, and identifies opportunities for performance and capability enhancement. It includes the measurement, identification and verification of system technical and supportability deficiencies, associated root cause analyses, evaluation of the potential for deficiency correction and the development of a range of corrective action options. 

Typically business case analysis and/or life cycle economic analysis are performed to determine the relative costs and risks associated with the implementation of various corrective action options. Sustaining Engineering also includes the implementation of selected corrective actions to include configuration or maintenance processes and the monitoring of key sustainment health metrics. This includes: 

• Collection and triage of all service use and maintenance data
• Analysis of environmental and safety hazards, failure causes and effects, reliability and maintainability trends, and operational usage profiles changes
• Root cause analysis of in-service problems (including operational hazards, deficiency reports, parts obsolescence, corrosion effects, and reliability degradation)
• The development of required design changes to resolve operational issues
• Other activities necessary to ensure cost-effective support to achieve peacetime and wartime readiness and performance requirements over a system's life cycle

 Technical surveillance of critical safety items, approved sources for these items, and the oversight of the design configuration baselines (basic design engineering responsibility for the overall configuration including design packages, maintenance procedures, and usage profiles) for the fielded system to ensure continued certification compliance are also part of the sustaining engineering effort. Periodic technical review of the in-service system performance against baseline requirements, analysis of trends, and development of management options and resource requirements for resolution of operational issues should be part of the sustaining effort.”

The objective of sustaining engineering, one of the 12 Integrated Product Support (IPS) Elements outlined in Appendix A of the PSM Guidebook, is to “support in-service systems in their operational environments.” Further information is also available in a Sustaining Engineering ACQuipedia article and in the Sustaining Engineering section on the LOG CoP References & Tools website.