Thales’s combined expertise, equipment and support helps reinforce customers’ supply chain, introducing unrivalled in-depth understanding and expert management of complex control systems, along with robust strategies to ensure continuous safe operations.
Typically, this will be for the energy sector, but the depth and breadth of Thales’s expertise and resources extends to any highly regulated sector that relies on operational stability and continuity of service provision. For example, Thales supports key aspects of the UK’s aerospace industry, and its rail network infrastructure, in the same way.
Thales supports safe provision of around 80 per cent of the UK’s nuclear-generated electricity.
Thales’s Engineering and Supply Chain Management service brings unparalleled technological knowledge and applied understanding to the table.
Spanning over 50 years, and multiple sectors, it includes deep and wide operational expertise, and full appreciation of the regulatory context.
With this comes full accountability, which gives clients unmatched confidence in managing complex control systems that are often modular in nature, and may have been adapted, expanded and upgraded over many years of continuous operation.
If a key part of such a control system fails – or is identified by Thales’s predictive processes as about to fail – Thales experts can remove it, take it apart and build an exact replica that does exactly the same thing. To back this up, Engineering Management and Supply Chain Management from Thales includes thorough testing to specified operational parameters, comprehensive explanations of design, detailed information on component parts and full schematics. This gives customers’ in-house experts and engineers the full confidence they need to conduct first-line maintenance. Thales is one of very few companies in the world equipped to do this.
Thales is currently in the process of providing 2,300 replica control system boards for a ‘Big Six’ energy supplier – manufacturing to the exact original specification using superior techniques.
System Audit and Consolidated Risk Position
Integral to the Engineering and Supply Chain Management service, Thales also provides a structured approach to helping customers better understand and manage complex and operationally critical control systems.
System Audit takes a detailed look at the whole system – cataloguing it, monitoring failure patterns and spares inventories alongside known challenges, available suppliers and field engineers. This produces a comprehensive report detailing a customer’s current situation and its associated risks. It tells customers where any existing and potential issues lie, and details appropriate solutions.
Helping system owners move from what they think, to what they know.
Importantly, System Audit identifies what is less critical in terms of risk, and more dependable in terms of parts and components – thereby providing an accurate and useful overview.
For example, one part of a complex control system may have a pattern of frequent failures, but this may be ‘characteristic and accepted’ – and supported by the appropriate availability of spares and replacement expertise. Conversely, the system may have more durable and dependable components that fail far less frequently, but an absence of spares (or known scarcity of spares) can nevertheless pose significant risk. This aspect of System Audit and Consolidated Risk Position is all about identifying and achieving a reassuring balance between reliability and availability.
Identifying and achieving a reassuring balance between reliability and availability.
A System Audit follows five key stages
1. Establishing the current system configuration
2. Fault and failure analysis
3. Identifying obsolescence issues
4. Detailing spares holdings
5. Analysing the supply chain
Thales feeds all of the resultant data into a modelling tool, from which it can provide a detailed and comprehensive report on where a customer’s key risks lie – i.e. the consolidated risk position.
Consolidated Risk Position
This report typically goes above and beyond what customers already have by way of system knowledge and risk analysis. They may well have a system configuration for their plant, but in many cases their knowledge of individual boards, power supplies and monitoring systems will be incomplete or not ‘joined up’.
System Audit provides the often-absent finer detail along with the all-important bigger picture.
For example, a power supply may be failing simply because of incorrect loading, or two identical systems could be in the same room, with one failing less frequently not due to superior build or components, but simply due to better ventilation. Such issues may not become apparent without an in-depth, all-encompassing audit that can save money and unnecessary operational headaches.
Through-life Support for obsolescence and failure issues
Thales’s Through-life Support offering comes from experts that specialise in obsolescence and failure issues. For the most part, clients will have in-house engineers who understand how the system works, but who may not have the time or resources to understand fully why it fails. This is where Thales steps in – once again providing the bigger picture to help customers understand their circumstances in detail and plan more effectively for the future.
With access to one of the world’s largest and comprehensive databases for electronic components, Thales is a world leader in providing provenance for whatever a customer’s continuous operation requires.
For complex control system components, this ‘true history’ is vital in ensuring customers have access to genuine parts from genuine and trusted manufacturers.
What’s more, Thales has methodically developed its own specialist databases over decades of experience supporting complex control systems. These databases are also linked to proven suppliers, adding reassurance. Component and manufacturing history is increasingly vital in the current climate of counterfeit or unfamiliar ‘aftermarket’ parts.
Knowing a component’s origin and quality through access to proven suppliers means Thales can support complex control systems with confidence. Then, once the system is replicated using these verified components, Thales has the requisite software tools to fully model and analyse its intended operation and give an accurate indication of how long that component – and therefore the system’s functionality – will last.
Compatibility, functionality and dependability
With access to one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive databases for electronics components, and its own specialist databases linked to proven suppliers, Thales can ensure compatibility, functionality and dependability in ways its customers and some of their providers can’t. While customers will know their systems, and may be able to source parts and components for them, they can’t always guarantee availability or quality, and this is where Thales’s service introduces unique value.
What Thales provides is an all-encompassing service. And this includes updating software as well as ensuring hardware is of a suitably high standard for critical systems.
Inevitably, the availability of certified replacement parts can decline over time, with providers discontinuing specific products as demand decreases, or even going out of business. This makes it harder to source and secure the components that ensure continuous safe operation of complex control systems.
Thales’s Obsolescence Strategy introduces a clearly defined approach to managing this effectively, and future-proofing control systems that may be fundamentally the same as they were decades ago.
Thales supports the obsolescence challenge in a proactive way, ensuring customers needn’t invest in replacing equipment and components all in one go. Through a System Audit and Consolidated Risk Position, they can prioritise investment and avoid unnecessary expenditure.
Safety and peace of mind
If a system is being monitored constantly and any operational issues can be pre-empte, safety and peace of mind against expensive or potentially dangerous downtime improves considerably.
Unrivalled expertise and access to trusted components.
Thales’s all-encompassing and expertly managed service ensures such safety and peace of mind continues, as well as the ability to keep up with modern standards and changing regulatory requirements, especially in terms of both cyber and physical security. For example, if a customer manages its control systems through a smaller business with just a few key experts, there’s always the risk that the expertise moves on, or becomes too specialist to cope with changes or upgrades.
With its unrivalled expertise and access to trusted components, Thales is effectively a one-stop shop that can help future-proof the supply chain, ensure wise investment, and provide trusted expertise well into the future.