Future U.S. Navy ships will operate with a crew that may be half or less of current ship crew size. To maintain readiness with a reduced crew size, tools are needed to support enhanced Sailor productivity on-ship. Everyday workflow will continue to need a minimum contingent of crew, however special circumstances to arise that require access to Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), and providing the sailor/maintainer with effective tools that provide the data feeds necessary to support reach back to Distance Support will leverage the experience and training of on-ship and off-ship SMEs. Cybernet has developed the Shipboard Wireless Maintenance Assistant (SWMA) Platform to support maintenance and logistics. Our approach to the programs problem is to leverage this hardware platform and to focus on development and integration of Navy processes and software elements into the maintenance, local and remote, workflow to support effective, efficient problem solving on non-standard, undocumented problems. This data should be recorded and made available for future occurrences of the same or similar problem.
Benefit: The SWMA Platform is a developing system for use by DoD and DoD contractors in the maintenance and logistics communities. TW09 was the platforms first major introduction to sailors that sufficiently proved out the viability of the hardware. The system is currently in trials to support US Army logistics at various bases across the country. The key development for the Platform at this stage is to focus on application and workflow integration. This is because often the software applications that are currently deployed are stove-piped systems that do not offer ease of integration or there is a lack of a specifically designed application to support on-site, on-demand data collection and entry. This program offers the SWMA Platform the opportunity to focus development on specific applications to support maintenance for use in long-distance support. The integration of a long-distance support capability further enhances the SWMA Platforms capabilities, aiding in long-term commercialization and the Navys more immediate need to manage technical incidents remotely.
Keywords: SME, SME, Subject Matter Expert, Distance Support, Conferencing, remote, Data Collection, maintenance
