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US Navy warships are capital-intensive national defense assets that require periodic depot and intermediate level maintenance availabilities (periods). Oftentimes, ship maintenance is deferred or forgone altogether due to geopolitical strife or fiscal challenges. The impacts of missed maintenance are not only a burden on ships’ crews, but they also have a deleterious effect on current and future readiness. It is a difficult task to strike a balance between current and future readiness when insufficient resources are available to sustain a fleet of warships. This paper draws from multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT) to develop a ship maintenance decision-making model that considers attributes from the current and life cycle readiness cohorts. Using the current maintenance plans for two DDG 51-class ships entering availabilities in same fiscal year, this model determines which ship is more capable of absorbing a loss of maintenance and planned modernizations relative to the context of the decision environment. Five attributes are considered for the overall decision: mandatory maintenance, non-mandatory maintenance, mission impact from maintenance, mission impact from planned modernizations, and maintenance backlog. The model presented here is generalizable to a number of U.S. Navy ships and watercraft and can be used to inform decision-makers of the short- and long-term impacts of deferring critical maintenance.

Manufacturers and remanufacturers strive to maximize supply chain effectiveness by eliminating wastes in all their forms. This line of research extends the effectiveness during the products' working lives. Fraud in the warranty service chain (WSC) is one such source of waste that leads to revenue losses in the short term but when left unchecked leads to far worse results in the long term. Warranty frauds in the new product industry have received significant attention in recent literature. Addressing fraud issues in the remanufacturing industry have not been a high priority. Previous studies considered the primary parties in the WSC as possible sources of fraud. However, several unique opportunities exist for the secondary parties when it comes to fraud. This chapter considers fraud originating from one of the secondary parties of the WSC, namely the warranty administrator. The chapter models this fraud scenario using discrete event simulation and explores a possible fraud mitigation scenario.

The attraction of public private partnerships (PPPs) for governments is that the on-ground fructification of infrastructure projects is far higher than the traditional implementation route through public sector or departmental undertakings. Besides, time overruns are also considerably reduced. However, empirical evidence does not clearly establish that PPPs are cost efficient. This coupled with the risk intensity has impacted the long run flow of private capital to infrastructure PPPs and it therefore calls for a more scientific approach to management of profitability related risks. Appropriate management control systems (MCS) could be the answer, provided they can favorably impact profitability. Aggregating data from road, ports, airports, urban infrastructure, railways and power PPP ventures implemented in India, this chapter attempts to study the relationship between MCS and returns to sponsors through regression analysis. The study concludes that multiple MCS have a significant relationship with sponsors’ profitability.