A new contract and a fresh approach to the in-service support in the north of the RAN’s Armidale class patrol boat fleet appear to be paying dividends.
Design and construction of the original 14-strong Armidale class was undertaken by Austal but as a sub-contractor to Defence Maritime Services – later Serco – who were also responsible for sustainment under a contract awarded in 2003.
In 2017 Thales was selected to take over Serco’s support agreement with a five-year contract potentially worth $55 million a year that is extendable to the Armidales’ scheduled retirement in 2025.
The operative date for commencement of the new contract was 1 July last year but this was moved forward to 1 May when it became clear the incumbent was struggling to deliver services as employees looked for opportunities elsewhere.
The new agreement requires the availability of 13 Armidales – HMAS Bundaberg was destroyed by fire in August 2014 – for an average of 250 materiel days per year.
“In essence that means that the platform and its systems are available for the mission,” Max Kufner, Thales’ Deputy Vice President Marine said to ADM. “For the Armidales, one of the main mission systems is the RHIB, they can’t do their operations without it. So long as the ship can move and get to where it’s got to go and deploy and recover its RHIB and complete the operational mission, then it’s considered ‘materiel ready’.
“It’s a performance-based contract but we’ve got a period without the 250-day requirement and that gives us time to get up to speed and understand all the issues. Overall the maintenance has been going well. We’ve done more than 45 maintenance periods and five or six have finished a couple of days early, five or six have finished a couple of days late, and the others were all on time.”
Thales has a number of performance-based contracts in support of the RAN and each of vessel has its own unique challenges says Kufner.
“All RAN vessels have a usage and upkeep cycle (UUC) that defines maintenance and operational periods. For Armidales we knew the UUC would be high tempo and that certainly has been the case. It would be fair to say we are still learning and looking forward to embedding ongoing improvements to deliver better outcomes for the Navy in the future.”
Support for 11 Armidales including centralised planning is based in Darwin at HMAS Coonawarra while two boats operationally based in Cairns are maintained in Cairns.
Facilities at Coonawarra include a syncrolift to get boats out the water, a travel system, and 11 hard stand bays, two of which are covered and another two are inside a very large shed.
In Cairns, Thales sub-contractors Tropical Reef, BSE and Norship all have either slip bays or lifts, with most of the out-of-water work being undertaken by Norship.
“Norship did a lot of work in the past for Serco and they’re familiar with the boats, they also do work for us in Darwin,” Kufner explained. “But the overall working relationship has changed, we have a more hands-on approach to managing the work so we don’t just hand over an entire maintenance period and say go for it, we manage the maintenance period ourselves and we’ll also engage some of the contractors ourselves.
“The number of boats we work on at the same time is based on the UUC and Navy’s operational program but give or take, at any given time we’ll be working on anywhere from two to four boats in parallel.”
Challenges
The main challenge in Darwin is the climate, Kufner says – three to four hours of torrential rain every day in the November to April wet season, and the cyclone season stretching over the same period.
“Maintenance routines remain the same throughout the year although one thing we don’t do in Darwin’s wet season is paint; the paint won’t cure, it’s too humid. If there’s a vessel that does need substantial painting for whatever reason we’ll probably take her over to Cairns and do it there.
“If we get a cyclone warning, we’ll literally strap vessels that are on the hard stand or short of crews and therefore moved to the hard, to tiedown points so they can’t go anywhere. If the weather is bad enough, boats alongside with crewing available will put to sea since a cyclone at sea is generally easier to ride out. You’ve also got to remember the 8.5 metre tide runs every day and the need to constantly check mooring lines.”
Depending on the UUC, planning a maintenance period involves checking on the work undertaken in the previous period and what’s scheduled, creating a time-based preventative maintenance list to which is added any corrective maintenance and all the outstanding configuration changes that need to be made.
“We then plan our worklist and check on what materiel will be needed; usually there are no surprises because we’re looking at the materiel as we develop the maintenance list,” Kuffer outlined to ADM. “There are some six-monthly tasks, some are 12 months, some are 18 or 24 months and there are even some 60-month activities involving propulsion units.
“We don’t service the two engines on board, it’s easier to remove them and install two new or refurbished engines. The ones we take out will go to the workshop where they’ll be fully refurbished and go into inventory ready for the next ship.”
Across Darwin and Cairns Thales has about 100 people working on the Armidale program with CASG and the supply chain to undertake all the engineering, handling the configuration management, and carrying out many of the design changes. The entire team of ship managers, planners and production personnel is involved in executing maintenance periods and preparing the next activity.
The unexpectedly early start to the contract in May 2017 involved speedy personnel evaluation and recruitment. Thales staff turnover is now running at a normal rate according to Kufner.
“In setting up, CASG and Navy were fully appreciative of what we were trying to do so quickly and we were initially given a lot of bandwidth to do things outside the box; they supported us in those efforts and we’ve worked since then to get to a steady state as quickly as we can, including systems and procedures.”
Austal role
The Thales contract includes a requirement for a long-term commercial relationship with Austal. This has already included cooperation on the mid-life remediation by Austal of seven Armidales that began in late 2016 and is now close to completion – the same hull remediation and configuration changes were carried out earlier on six Armidales in Singapore.
Austal is also invited to quote on many of the maintenance tasks that are performed on the boats in Darwin.
“Depending on their workload at the time they’ll choose to quote or not to quote on tasks as appropriate,” Kufner said. “Austal is one of our key partners as they have most of the IP on the platform management systems so they tend to exclusively do that work as a sub-contractor.”
The Austal remediation dealt mainly with cracks in the boats’ aluminium hull and superstructure and repairing structural weaknesses in the platform rather than replacing or upgrading systems.
“Generally speaking we’ve found that the boats that have been remediated are closer to having a standard maintenance period. With boats that had not been remediated we were finding some quite challenging structural work to undertake in maintenance periods,” Kufner explained.
The challenge there was sourcing sufficient aluminium-certified welders and structural workers in Darwin.
“There’s been a couple of instances of boats coming in with structural defects and on those occasions we’ve pooled with Austal and Norship to bring people from either Cairns or Perth. You can’t always find everything you need locally, but we’ve got more than 4,000 approved companies in our ship repair supply chain so we can usually find someone who can help us out.”
While the majority of Armidale maintenance is outsourced, Thales takes direct responsibility for planning, management and execution and quality of the work. Thales is also working with the Fleet Support Unit (FSU) to help utilise and up-skill this resource.
“We’ve taken on a couple of trades people and trade supervisors so that we can increase the work we give to the FSU, who are doing some great work on the Armidales with us as a team. Of course we retain the ultimate responsibility for the quality of the work that is delivered.
“It’s a really good story, the sailors become more familiar with the equipment and understand it better, and when they’re posted to a ship they’re better equipped to deal with minor to intermediate failures.
Given the early success of its Armidale work, it’s no surprise that that Thales has responded to the Invitation to Register (ITR) that closed in May for the inservice support of the 12 Offshore Patrol Vessels (OPVs) that will replace the Armidale class fleet.
The first OPV from German ship designer Lurssen, with a combined build between ASC and Civmec, is scheduled for delivery to Defence in late 2021 with the remaining 11 vessels being delivered at intervals of nine months. Six of the OPVs will be home-ported in Darwin at HMAS Coonawarra.
Tendering from a shortlist is expected late this year with a downselect and contractual negotiations before 2019.
This article first appeared in the October 2018 edition of ADM.