CHAIRMAN OPENING REMARKS

Tom Hinshaw introduced Richard Danks, Deputy Division Chief, Facilities and Test Engineering Division. Mr. Danks, on behalf of LeRC welcomed the Board to the Center.

The Chairman extend his thanks for those who could attend and informed the board that due to various issues some of the centers had to cancel their travel plans at the last minute.

Bela Gutman, the new JPL SPECSINTACT manager, was introduced and the representatives from EMR the company that has been engaged by NASA headquarters to review the guidespecs for Reliability Centered Maintenance issues were also introduced.

Tom Hinshaw handed out two magazine articles that he felt would be of interest to the board. One article was concerning the "Greening" of specs (designing environmentally aware) and the other was about the commissioning of new buildings.

RELIABILITY CENTERED MAINTENANCE (RCM)

Al Rose from EMR opened the meeting with an overview of what RCM is all about and what their current tasking is as contracted with NASA HQ. EMR is reviewing the NASA Mastertext sections to determine which sections may have criteria which can be edited to encompass RCM requirements. As of this meeting they have identified approximately 66 sections that may be changed to include RCM requirements. They have also determined that a new section covering the general criteria of RCM work should be developed.

A concern in the past from the board was that new RCM procedures may require expensive equipment that the NASA center's may not have. Richard Danks stated that NASA HQ has purchased and each center has received equipment for RCM testing.

It was agreed during the roundtable discussion that getting the information from the field on RCM critical processes and procedures to the design community will be critical to ensure that the desired criteria can be incorporated into the specifications.

EMR has a schedule date of December to provide the marked up RCM changes to Dan Levy at NASA HQ. The board has requested that the sections be transmitted to the board as the review process proceeds so that there isn't a huge task to review all at once when the sections are turned over to NASA HQ. In their review and editing, EMR will provide text that identifies test acceptance requirements.

ACTION: Al Lew will work with Dan Levy at HQ to establish a procedure that will provide the sections to the board as they are completed by EMR. Any such procedure should not effect the timely completion of the current contract with EMR.

ACTION: The lead center will put the 66 sections that have been identified as possibly having RCM criteria on the SPECSINTACT home page.

MARKETING OPPORTUNITIES

Al Lew presented the marketing information sent by Cheryl Gebhardt. The lead center went to the A/E/C convention in Chicago, June 3-5 and shared space in the NIBS booth to promote SPECSINTACT to the professional community. A CD was manufactured at KSC which included an overview of why SPECSINTACT should be used, along with SPECSINTACT and WORDSPEC software that could be downloaded. These CD's were given to interested attendees at the convention. The EG&G team will also attend the CSI national convention in Baltimore later in the month (June) and provide the same marketing support.

It has been discussed at the SI-CCB meeting that the SPECSINTACT format be changed to match the CSI & AIA guidespecs in respect to numbering and appearance.

ACTION: After the RCM changes have been incorporated into our specifications, Al Lew will try and get some articles in some of the engineering and professional publications on the subject so that the design community will know that we have this information in our specifications.

EXPERTISE DATA BASE

Al Lew proposed that a data base of "experts" in the various fields of design should be established so that these people can be called upon for help within there area of expertise when applicable sections are used or reviewed. The Board agreed that this would be helpful when updating the specifications or when a center may have a job using a specific section.

ACTION: Each center should look closely at their current engineering and design staff and forward to Al Lew the names of those people they feel are very strong in any particular field.

ACTION: Al Lew will create a data bank using these names and will distribute it to the SPECSINTACT managers for their use.

SI-CCB MEETING

Tom Hinshaw gave a brief overview of what was discussed at the last SI-CCB meeting. The board has decided that since we have a successful web page the SPECSINTACT news letter need not be published and mailed out anymore.

WORDSPEC has been labeled as BETA version up until now but will no longer be labeled as BETA.

Each center has access to the Adobe Acrobat reader free from the Internet, but will need to obtain a copy of the Adobe Writer in order to create PDF files for specs to be placed on the Internet. Electronic bid packages are to be used in the future. This is another reason why the Adobe Writer software will be required by the centers.

Submittals were discussed and the board feels that it would be prudent to reduce the submittal descriptions down to the five that are recognized by CSI in their Manual of Practice. At the current time we have 19 in our text.

Eventually the SI board would like to have a system where the CAD system, specifications and cost estimating systems will all be able to interface and work together.

ENGINEERING UPDATE

Carl Smildsin gave the board an update on tasks accomplished since the last meeting. Since the last meeting the staffing concerns of the board have been addressed by EG&G by an internal reorganization. The engineering positions that were open for a period of time have been filled by using the engineering staff in place at KSC. By using this personnel for text and 1620 review the engineering support base is actually larger than if the two head count openings were filled from the outside.

It was determined after a review of the usage charts from the past several years that there are three sections that can be removed at this time from the NASA Mastertext.

ACTION: Remove the following section from the NASA guidespecs;
02845 - PARKING BUMPERS
11025 - FIRE-INSULATED RECORD VAULT DOORS
15765 - FINNED TUBE RADIATION

After a brief discussion the board agreed that in response to 1620 number 982246 the lead center should remove the current inspection and testing form from the 13852 section and just place text in the section referencing the latest version of the NFPA acceptance test form to be used.

ACTION: Carl Smildsin to complete 1620 as directed by the board.

The board agreed with the Johnson proposal to close out the 48 submittal 1620's that have been on hold for the past several meetings. With the new tasking of reducing the 1620 descriptions down to 5 it was felt that these can be reviewed again in the future if necessary.

For NASA Mastertext 1620's it was requested that they be forwarded to SPECSINTACT engineering directly at :

SPECSINTACT Engineering, BOC-196
P.O. Box 21267
KSC, FL 32815

It was felt that this will expedite the information flow between the lead center and the 1620 provider. Within 72 hours of the receipt of the 1620 the lead center will respond to the originating party and will provide a tracking (1620) number.

ACTION: The lead center will look into the possibility of putting a revised 1620 form on the SPECSINTACT home page that will be used only for NASA text change requests. This form ideally will be configured with fields to be filled in by the requester and have a print button and a send button.

SOFTWARE UPDATE

Carl Smildsin presented an update on the software effort since the last board meeting. This was followed by a brief roundtable discussion by the board. The primary effort underway in the software arena is the work being done to convert from the 16 bit to the 32 bit format. At the present time it is planned that the 32 bit format will be available for use in a beta format by October 1998. It is anticipated that by January 1999 the beta will be removed and the 32 bit will go on line permanently.

WORDSPEC is being used quite successfully by the user community and the only trouble calls that are being experienced are the "how to" type of questions and not bug items. Ray Schuler opened up a discussion concerning a problem they had at Ames where they edited sections in Word , but the changes were not recognized when converted back to SPECSINTACT. Tom Hinshaw shared that he had the same problem once when he had changed the file name while in WORDSPEC and tried to convert back to SGML. The board would like to see some type of warning or note to appear in WORDSPEC when trying to do a 'save as' and the specifier plans to change the file name while in the word editor. Changing the file name to one not recognized in the SGML job will cause the section to be ignored by the SPECSINTACT software. Any file name changes should be performed in the SPECSINTACT Jobs Module, either before converting to Word or after converting back from Word to SGML.

BUDGET DISCUSSION

Full cost accounting is coming. It is anticipated that by December 1999 full cost accounting will be in place for NASA.

Current funding from NASA HQ is all coming from code JX, FP&D funds. This funding is covering both the Mastertext work and software support.

ENVIRONMENTAL

Ms. Luz Jeziorowski from LeRC came and gave an overview of how they have been handling lead abatement work and what they are doing with the development of a lead abatement specification. When blasting on a recent job, LeRC used a sponge medium in place of the usual silica grit. This material seemed to work well as far as removal of the lead paint, but a clogging problem arose due to high humidity. This was the only time this product was used. The sponge grit seemed to keep the air-borne particulate down significantly compared to silica grit.

The current Army and Navy specs on lead abatement will be reviewed by Luz for content when creating the LeRC specification. After the specification is completed it will be reviewed by the SPECSINTACT managers to determine if it can be adopted as a NASA master section.

It was mentioned that when we tried in the past to do this with the asbestos abatement section, that local regulations kept this as more of a local section. This may also end up being the case for the lead abatement section, but the information and research may be helpful in establishing a section at each center that better meets the local requirements.

SAFETY

Luke Wilkens from LeRC made a presentation on behalf of Art Lee, NASA Headquarters.

A recent review by NASA safety at HQ identified the NASA centers that currently use the Omega fire sprinkler systems that have been determined to be faulty. A notice to design personnel at the centers has been sent in the past warning about the use of this product. The board would like a link on the SPECSINTACT web site to the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) page that addresses the Omega fire sprinkler issue.

TAILORING

Ron Williams gave a presentation on how the tailoring task could be accomplished using an outside contractor. The board wants to pursue the possibility of another contractor doing the initial phase one of the tailoring effort. Phase One as outlined by Ron Williams would be to review the NASA guidespecs and identify 'key' words and products to be incorporated in the tailoring effort. Ron will be approaching his base design contractor to obtain costs for this first phase.

Ron Williams is going to contact Kenny Hudson at Goddard Space Flight Center and present his plan as proposed to the board. He will also see if Kenny Hudson has a contractor that can bid on this first phase.

CLOSE

The next board meeting is tentatively planned for Washington, DC the second week of November, 1998.

 

 

 

 

SpecsIntact Home Page

News Archive Index

NASA SPECSINTACT CONFIGURATION
CONTROL AND COORDINATING BOARD
(NS-CCCB) MEETICONFIGURATION
CONTROL AND COORDINATING BOARD
(NS-CCCB) MEETIAND COORDINATING BOARD
(NS-CCCB) MEETING
LeRC

June 9, 10 & 11, 1998

Attendee List Action Items Summary

 

 

SpecsIntact and WordSpec are software products of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and are developed and maintained under the Joint Base Operations and Support Contract (J-BOSC) at the Kennedy Space Center.  All other products mentioned are registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective companies.
SpecsIntact, Kennedy Space Center, FL 32899
Technical Support line - (321) 867- 8800, Fax - (321) 867- 1444
Email - specsintact@ksc.nasa.gov
Web Site Curator: Cheryl Fitz-Simon
NASA Official Responsible: Miguel Morales
If you have questions, problems or comments regarding this web site, email: Cheryl.Fitz-Simon@jbosc.ksc.nasa.gov
Last modified: January 14, 2002