Product Life-Cycle Management for Early Acquisition Programs

The Department of Defense (DoD) understands the value of the “Digital Thread” that is created during the pre-Milestone A & B activities, but how does one capture and store this information for later use? Up until now, most of this information was collected by program support functions and stored in various stove-piped systems, making retrieval difficult at best, impossible at worst. The U.S. Air Force has created a template for capturing, managing, and controlling this early acquisition data in a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM suite), bringing the same engineering rigor to early acquisition data as to later engineering and technical data and contract deliverables. The Air Force and Siemens funded a trial project to create an “Early Acquisition” PLM-in-a-box template, using Siemens Teamcenter PLM suite, for the purpose of proving out the ability to push the digital thread backward into the DoD 5000 pre-Milestone A & B activities. The goal was a reusable template that can be used for any program of any size. The template produced was adopted by two programs within the Air Force (Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent and Long-Range Standoff) and partially by one program in the Navy (Stingray). The Air Force will use this model to capture and reuse pre-Milestone A & B data for future programs.Naval Postgraduate School Acquisition Research Progra