ATLAS wins comprehensive service contract for mine warfare systems of the Netherlands and Belgian navies

Thursday, Jul 02, 2009

The Services Department of ATLAS ELEKTRONIK has reported an achievement of strategic importance: in future, ATLAS will provide wide-ranging support to ensure the operational readiness of 16 ultramodern mine warfare systems of the type IMCMS (Integrated Mine Countermeasure System) for the Belgian Navy and the Royal Netherlands Navy. The corresponding agreement with ATLAS has been signed by Belgium’s Minister of Defence.

The contract includes a large share of services to be rendered continuously, primarily involving a technical hotline with obsolescence and configuration management – a novel concept in this field. Both for the participating navies and for ATLAS, this yields the possibility of using active technical-logistic management to steer the future development of IMCMS, in order that the customers’ objectives are optimally achieved in respect of performance, availability and cost-effectiveness. The structure of the agreement includes the possibility of carrying out major modernization measures.

With a term of fifteen years, the contract covers the entire life-cycle of the Belgian and Netherlands mine countermeasure vessels; these comprise ten units of the Netherlands ALKMAAR class and six of the Belgian FLOWER class. ATLAS is the system leader and responsible for integration of the IMCMS on the vessels.

The signing of the contract represents the successful end to a phase of complex, systematic work and, at the same time, may herald the start of another success story: other European navies using ATLAS minehunting systems of the type IMCMS are also interested in the support concept arranged with Belgium and the Netherlands.

The Managing Directors of ATLAS ELEKTRONIK, Dieter Rottsieper and Kai Horten, were delighted: “This is a significant success for ATLAS in the new business segment of in-service support. Encouraged by the cooperation with these two key customers, we are expanding the services of ATLAS with a view to offering our clientele the benefits of a partnership based on trust and teamwork in this field.”

Source: ATLAS