The unsupported asset

Who pays for the first repair once the delivery team has gone, and will the money still be there when it is needed?

It is a modest question, and it decides more programmes than the specification does. Equipment is rarely lost in a dramatic way. It is lost when a routine fault occurs, nobody has the authority, budget, tools or parts to fix it, and the asset is quietly moved from the operational list to the corner of a compound.

A funded capability becomes an unsupported asset gradually, and usually through decisions that each looked reasonable at the time.

Support is the easiest line to cut

Routine maintenance has to be paid for while everything still appears to be working. That is its weakness. A support budget buys the absence of a problem, and the absence of a problem is hard to defend in a budget round against something that is visibly broken elsewhere.

So the line is redirected, partly or wholly, often by people with good reasons and no sight of the consequence. Service intervals stretch. Consumables are rationed. Parts are taken from one vehicle to keep another running, which works for a while and then leaves two vehicles off the road instead of one. By the time the effect is visible, the cost of recovery is a multiple of the maintenance that was saved.

Two years of maintenance is not a sustainment plan

A purchase agreement might include two years of maintenance. It sounds reassuring, and on paper it is. In practice it depends on things the agreement often does not secure.

• Engineers with the right tools, test equipment and diagnostic software licences, on site or within a realistic travel time.
• Spares that can be obtained, shipped and cleared through customs within the time the fault allows, including any part that needs an export licence.
• A budget line that survives the next financial year and is protected from being redirected.
• Someone on the recipient’s side who knows what was promised and can tell whether it is being delivered.

If any one of those fails, the equipment can become unusable well before the support period ends. And when the period does end, the question it was meant to defer arrives anyway: who pays now?

The training that comes with the kit

Equipment, and donated equipment in particular, often arrives with limited training and no spares or maintenance contract. What training there is tends to come with caveats. It is usually the trainers’ own programme, built on their tactics, skills and ways of working, rather than what the client wants and needs. It is rarely tailored to the equipment and systems the recipient already operates, or to how the new kit will actually be used alongside them.

It is also usually aimed at operators. The people who keep equipment running, the mechanics, technicians and storekeepers, and the officer who signs for the spares budget, are an afterthought. An organisation can end up with certified drivers and pilots and nobody able to diagnose a fault, order the right part or plan the next service.

Train-the-trainer is the usual answer, and it is the right one, but only if it is real. That means instructors selected from people who will stay, assessed against a standard rather than attendance, given the material in a form they can own and adapt, and then observed running their own courses before the external team withdraws. A course delivered once to one cohort is not a pipeline. When that cohort is posted, promoted or leaves, the capability leaves with them.

Sustainment belongs in the bid

For prime contractors the temptation is understandable. Sustainment is hard to price, unattractive in a competitive evaluation and easy to describe as the client’s responsibility. A bid that leaves it vague often looks cheaper than one that does not.

That saving is borrowed against the prime’s reputation. When the equipment stops working in year two, nobody remembers the evaluation criteria. They remember whose name was on the delivery.

Designing sustainment in is not complicated, but it has to start at inception and bid stage rather than being added during delivery.

• Cost the whole life, not the purchase. Set out the recurring cost of operating and maintaining the capability, year by year, and say plainly who is expected to carry each element.
• Build the training around the client. Start from their requirement, their existing equipment and systems and their people, rather than from a standard course the provider already owns.
• Train maintainers and instructors, not only operators, and schedule it so that local staff are running courses while the delivery team is still there to support them.
• Specify spares and tools as deliverables. Initial spares holdings, tooling, documentation and the route for reordering, with lead times and licensing stated.
• Make support verifiable. Agree what the client will see to confirm that maintenance is being done: service records, availability figures, spares consumption, and a named point of contact who can be held to them.
• Plan the transfer of responsibility. Name what moves to the client, when, and what has to be true before it does.

None of this needs to make a bid more expensive. Some of it makes a bid more credible, and for a buyer who has lived with an unsupported asset before, credibility on sustainment is often what decides it.

Questions before signing

Before committing, the buyer, and the prime offering the capability, should be able to answer these.

• Who pays for the first repair after the delivery team leaves, and from which budget line?
• Who controls the support money, and what protects it from being redirected?
• How will the client check that the agreed maintenance and support is actually delivered?
• Where do spares come from, how long do they take, and does any part need a licence?
• Who will maintain the equipment, and who trains their replacements?
• Was the training designed around the client’s requirement, equipment and people, or around someone else’s programme?
• If a routine fault stopped this asset next month, who has the authority, budget, tools and parts to put it right?

If several of these have no clear answer, the capability has not yet been designed. It has only been bought.

Our interest

Marchward works with clients and prime contractors across the life of a programme, from shaping the requirement and the bid through delivery and the transfer of responsibility, and we design and deliver training. An article arguing that sustainment should be planned from the start is an argument for the kind of work we do. That commercial interest should be kept in mind.

The recommendation we make most often here costs nothing: before signing, write down who pays for the first repair, and from which budget line. If nobody can, that is the finding.

Read next · Assessment method

Borrowed capability

How to assess whether an institution can sustain its performance when external support ends.