The Contribution of Test and Analysis to the No Fault Found (NFF) Issue within the UK MOD

This paper is a study of NFF and investigates the issue within the UK MOD with particular regard to test and analysis. A select group of people, who provide support to equipment used by the Army in the frontline, were interviewed to find out how various aspects of test and analysis contributed to NFF. The findings included, inadequate maintainer training, poor fault reporting systems, ineffective test procedures and many more. However, from the causes identified, operational pressure was the main driver and caused lack of communication between the operators and maintainers invariably leading to false diagnosis. Operational pressure also contributed to lack of sufficient diagnostic time that a maintainer had to find the root cause of a fault leading to speculative changes of Line Replaceable Units (LRUs). In both cases this would result in NFF. Anecdotal evidence suggests that a NFF rate of about 25% per LRU is being experienced with Urgent Operational Requirements (UORs). It was a problem that the Army were beginning to recognise and apply measures to reduce NFF at the frontline. This includes Automatic Test Equipment and Special to Type Test Equipment (STTE). However, STTE can be expensive to support and it is MOD policy to reduce proliferation of bespoke solutions and to use general purpose test equipment wherever possible. In order to accomplish this, MOD policy mandates the use of test standards but not all industry suppliers are keen to adopt standards as their perception was that there would be a potential loss of business.