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DPRTE 2021 partner BAE Systems delivers more global support to Royal Navy than ever

Maritime April 13, 2021

Official DPRTE 2021 event partner, BAE Systems, has revealed that it is now delivering deployed support to more of the Royal Navy’s OPVs than at any other time in its history.

With the commissioning of HMS Spey, the final of five new OPVs, BAE Systems is now supporting eight OPVs in the UK and around the world under the umbrella of its Contractor Logistics Support (CLS) contracts. This latest milestone underlines a long history of success delivered through this innovative framework.

The Royal Navy’s OPVs play a crucial role in defence. Nimble, flexible, and rapidly-deployable by design, the OPVs are used for a range of roles suited to this class of medium-sized vessel, including border and anti-piracy patrols, disrupting the flow of smuggled narcotics and supporting humanitarian relief efforts.

Under its two CLS contracts with the MOD, BAE Systems is trusted to provide whole-ship availability management services for the Royal Navy’s OPVs around the globe. Repairs and maintenance are delivered wherever in the world they are operationally required, assisting the Royal Navy to meet its deployed operational commitments.

As well as maximising ship availability and driving continual process improvement, this model delivers predictable costs to the Royal Navy, with risk shared between the customer and BAE Systems.

Thanks to BAE Systems’ industry-leading expertise, and the global network it utilises, the support team delivered an astonishing 98% operational availability in 2020.

“We’re celebrating a number of milestones on the programme this year,” commented Bill Page, Project Manager, CLS, BAE Systems. “We have just hit our 18th year of providing OPV Batch 1 support to the Royal Navy. Our availability figures have been on an upward trend in recent years, and, through constant improvements in our operational models – as part our constant drive for greater efficiency – we’ve delivered extremely high availability, despite the challenging conditions posed by COVID restrictions.”

The CLS contracts for the first batch of OPVs and the new ships play an important role in the MOD’s mission to deliver value better value-for-money to the taxpayer while maintaining its operational commitments.

BAE Systems acts as Prime Contractor on all OPV maintenance work around the world, delivering repairs itself and/or closely managing and overseeing key partner organisations.

“Our CLS contracts demonstrate that BAE Systems is an organisation that can reliably and consistently deliver deployed support to ships around the world when and where it is required,” continued Bill. “Few organisations have the scale or expertise to offer this kind of service. The assurance we can deliver – of working with the same managing supplier, which knows the customer’s business and their ships, and which manages its partner ecosystem as required – has proven highly appealing.”

Taking place at Farnborough International on June 23rd with elements of the event streamed online, DPRTE 2021 is the UK’s leading defence procurement and supply chain event.BAE Systems is an official DPRTE 2021 partner

For all involved within buying for or supplying to the defence sector, it’s an unmissable opportunity to hear from and engage with industry leaders, influencers and stakeholders.

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BAE Systems DPRTE 2021 HMS Spey Royal Navy

Post written by: Matt Brown