U.S Navy new Opus Suite customer - signs of growing interest in Opus Suite in the United States
The U.S. Navy and the F-35 Joint Program Office selected Opus Suite for LORA and logistics optimization. Two concrete signs of the growing interest in Opus Suite from the defense sector in the United States.
The U.S. Navy and the F-35 Joint Program Office selected Opus Suite for LORA and logistics optimization. Two concrete signs of the growing interest in Opus Suite from the defense sector in the United States.
While the Opus Suite tools have been well-known and widely employed in Europe and Asia for decades, there used to be relatively little interest from North America. Of course, there are some long-time users in the U.S. too, such as the US Air Force C-17 Program and departments within Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and Textron. But the usage of Opus Suite in the U.S. was so far typically initiated by international collaborations and export projects, rather than domestic US programs. Probable explanations for this are that cost-effectiveness and LCM (Life Cycle Management) were not the same top priority it is now, during the years of expanding US defense budgets, and also that the Department of Defense provided, and often even required the use of, in-house developed basic software tools such as COMPASS and SESAME.
The last years’ focus on cost cuts and reduction of the total ownership cost (RTOC) of technical systems have changed that situation. The drive for significant improvement and the re-evaluation and benchmarking of established methods and processes has also meant an increasing interest in finding alternative solutions. In this context, Opus Suite is increasingly seen as a powerful decision support tool for reducing the costs of procurement, operation, and maintenance of technical systems without sacrificing capacity or performance.
During the last three years, Systecon has attended several conferences and symposiums in the U.S. to explain our analytical approach to LCM and ILS, which is already widely used in the UK, Australia, and Scandinavia. We have also tried to demonstrate how the Opus Suite can provide invaluable decision support in this work. Since 2012, we have enhanced our U.S. presence by establishing a U.S.-based representative, WPI Services, with offices in Washington D.C., and Florida.
Our efforts to build awareness and knowledge about Opus Suite and Systecon in the U.S. are now beginning to pay off. Today, Opus Suite is used within the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program Office (F-35 JPO) to identify potential cost reductions there. In the U.S. Navy, both the Naval Sea Systems Command (“NavSea”) and the Naval Air Systems Command (“NavAir”) use Opus Suite in several different programs. For instance, Opus Suite is an integrated calculation engine in NavSea’s LCM solution, “ePLM-IDE”.
Systecon and WPI Services have conducted a large number of courses for the US Navy, focusing on Life Cycle Management, Logistics Optimization (LORA), modeling, and simulation.
