About this Course

Anyone wishing to pursue a career or is already employed in a systems engineering environment will benefit from this course as part of their Continuing Professional Development. It underpins and endorses the foundational knowledge essential to the activities of system design, manufacturing and production, logistic support, and field services. It provides an understanding of Supportability Engineering and its importance within Systems Engineering.

The course is "system generic" therefore applicable across many different systems engineering sectors.

We rely on Systems as part of our every day lives and our expectations are that they will meet the needs of our requirements when demanded.

To achieve this a Systems must be available for operation. It must maintain optimum performance, be cost-optimised, environmentally sustainable and energy efficient throughout its life cycle. 

This course "Supportability Engineering, a practical approach",  teaches the basic principles of Reliability, Maintainability and Availability that are fundamental to the life cycle of a System. In addition, it introduces the Student to:

• The Provisioning of System Spares,
• Failure Modes Effects Analysis (FMEA) and,
• Failure Reporting and Corrective Action System (FRACAS)

Students who complete this course will be able to demonstrate their commitment and achievement in the foundational knowledge and skills of Supportability Engineering and its importance in Systems Engineering.

The course also serves as a primer for the sophisticated software modelling tools in use today, that are  used to determine, cost-optimisation of system spares, simulation of system maintenance, operations and the prediction and analysis of system life cycle costs.

This course is a self-led, self-paced, modular e-learning course on the basic activities of Supportability Engineering from a practical, rather than an academic approach.

It has been designed for Students of all abilities. It delivers easy-to-learn lessons in Modules, allowing Students to complete the course over a period of time rather than a continuous period of study.

This course is about learning by “doing”. Students apply their academic knowledge and learn the fundamental activities essential to the life cycle of a System.

Students learn by doing worked examples, following step-by-step methods, helped by “how to” videos and completing practical exercises.

It challenges Students to make their own course notes and use a spreadsheet to do calculations and measurements.

Each Module has a quiz.  All quizzes are "open book" so Students can use their notes and spreadsheet data to answer the questions and consolidate what they have learnt. The course concludes with a final quiz covering all the course subjects.

Students should be competent in the rules of ordering in mathematics (BODMAS).

However, the worked examples, “step-by-step” methods and "how to" videos allow Students of all abilities to complete the course at their own pace.

Students will need to make their own notes and use a spreadsheet program, such as Microsoft® Excel or Apple Numbers®.