With a growing backlog of equipment repair and maintenance work, the U.S. military services and contractors
are finding that, in order to expedite the job, they need computer
systems that can share information across the supply chain.
“We’ve got to have an information system that has visibility
all the way back to the depots. We don’t have that today,”
said Col. William Crosby, Army project manager for cargo helicopters.
“I submit now that the system is broken.”
Better information means better communication between maintainers
on the front lines and depots, better tracking of replacement components,
more awareness of the history of parts and restructuring the work
to eliminate waste.
The private sector has created efficiency by identifying bottlenecks,
using analysis to expose waste in manufacturing processes and changing
work conditions by rearranging working spaces, shipping components
only on demand and reducing parts movement within machine shops.
Military experts say that treating the supply chain in the same
way could help streamline the clumsy, frequently disconnected military
process.
What started as methods to trim time and costs in the private sector
are being transferred to the military, although changes have been
“personality driven,” rather than organizational, said
Crosby at a conference sponsored by the Institute for Defense and
Government Advancement.
By implementing business practices and technologies available in
the private sector, the Defense Department could bring much needed
efficiencies to the logistics process, experts said. For example,
a front line maintainer would approach a broken machine and be able
to know, with a simple scanning device, its maintenance history,
hours deployed in the field, home depot and manufacturer. Each part
could likewise be scanned. If the maintainer in the field could
not determine a solution, he could appeal to experts at depots or
even liaisons at the manufacturing level. If a particularly enlightening
solution is found to a recurring problem, electronic manuals could
be updated overnight, in preparation for the next maintainer facing
a similar problem.
Such a system is far off. But that hasn’t stopped military
maintenance experts from taking the first steps in that direction,
said Dennis Wightman, program manager at the Logistics Management
Institute.
“The [Defense Department] is trying to put into place the
tools that would allow maintainers to beam back images and be directed
in the proper repair of an item,” he said. “There’s
an awful lot of emphasis on this in the electronic age, and I think
we’ll see more of it.”
The logisticians and maintainers of all services worry that budget
constraints will again lead to pressures to reduce costs, even as
combat makes their job increasingly demanding.
In the Air Force, for example, spare-parts funding is up and cannibalization
of aircraft parts is down, but “mission-capable maintenance”
rates are below average, said the Brig. Gen. David Gillett, Air
Force director of maintenance in the office of the deputy chief
of staff for installations and logistics.
With 40 percent of active-duty military personnel devoted to maintenance,
“we’ve been a target for [budget] reductions,” Gillett
said. “We’ve got a lot of reasons to improve processes.”
Gillett said that previous efforts at streamlining led to shortages
of spare parts and working equipment. “We did ourselves some
harm by taking the path one step too far,” he said.
A number of programs have been established within the Air Force
to facilitate the repair and servicing of equipment. An intelligent
logistics monitoring system is at the heart of a program called
expeditionary logistics for the 21st century, or eLog, which aims
for a 20 percent increase in system availability by 2007.
The software in eLog organizes spare-parts requests, helping to
reduce the downtime of damaged equipment. The program’s artificial
intelligence turns data into maintenance predictions by warning
of impending mechanical component failures in motorized vehicles.
Once this concept is coupled with sensor technology, constantly
updated information can reach as far back as the factory floors
of the continental United States.
Air Force maintainers also need to share data regarding the combat
conditions to better predict and target repair efforts, said Grover
Dunn, director of innovations and transformation for the deputy
chief of staff for installations and logistics.
Previously used equations for aircraft maintenance date to the
Cold War, when air sorties were more frequent but three times shorter
than operations today. This has a direct effect on maintenance needs
and scheduling repairs, Dunn said. “We need to adapt better
to deployment cycles.”
Every military service is grappling with similar issues. Thomas
Culligan, Raytheon’s executive vice president for business
development, cited the assignment of a Marine aviation clerk to
halt mistaken shipments of airplane parts to the Navy during Operation
Iraqi Freedom as an example of the need for improvement in the communications.
“The system let the Marine Corps down,” he said.
Among the advances he pointed out as major opportunities for maintainers
were radio-frequency tracking of replacement parts, the availability
of a global information grid and a combat information management
system. With these in place, he suggested, bringing data from the
front lines to the factory floors should be easier. The upshot would
be a system where replacement parts are pulled by user demand rather
than being pushed by guesswork.
The global information grid, or GIG, is a secure network connecting
soldiers of every service to each other, intelligence agencies and
suppliers. Analysts estimate it will likely take hundreds of billions
of dollars and up to 20 years to build the network.
There is a new emphasis on combining software systems and sensors
to predict battlefield needs. The Army and Navy are using software
packages called health and usage monitoring systems, which can identify
potential problems by analyzing data from aircraft in flight.
Other technologies include sensors that provide second-by-second
fuel consumption data and other test devices that determine the
amount of particles in engine oil. “Sensor technology employed
to watch our enemies will be used to spy on our own equipment,”
Culligan said.
Creating machine parts that can communicate their problems before
or after an incident could help prevent accidents, he said. The
Space Shuttle Columbia disaster is a case in point. “Wouldn’t
it be great to ask that tile what happened?”
Nick Kunesh, deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for logistics,
said that in the distant future the Navy would label components
with a digital identifier and gain its history and location availability
at a keystroke. The idea, called bitmass, is “RFID [radio frequency
identification] tags on steroids,” Kunesh said.
Much of this technology, however, will not be available until 2030.
The military is seeking answers now, and maintainers are looking
at simple changes.
Kunesh described some of the Navy’s short-term methods and
benefits of organizing the supply and repair chains.
By mapping the movement of repair crews and their equipment during
maintenance on an aircraft carrier, evaluators were able to cut
down the movement of aircraft parts and people by 97 percent and
62 percent, respectively. By saving time and effort, the pace of
repairs increased, Kunesh said.
Another evaluation led to the reduction of forklift travel at a
depot by 75 percent. Mountains of equipment were identified on carriers,
and their reorganization helped cut the time maintainers needed
to fish out engines from two hours to 45 minutes.
Such seemingly common-sense changes sometimes meet institutional
resistance, explained Rear Adm. Peter Williams, of the Naval Air
Systems Command.
“Our chief of naval operations is asking us to be better businesspeople,”
he said at a recent Defense Department maintenance conference. “We
were readiness abusers. We were a consumption culture.”
The era of readiness at any price is over, he added. These days
Navy personnel are tossing around efficiency jargon such as cost-wise
readiness, he said. “You hear that mantra through the fleet
now.”
One part of this increasing efficiency that vexes both military
and private sector managers is what to do with people when their
jobs are either replaced by machines or eliminated by preemptive
maintenance. “You have to be able to retrain your people and
send them somewhere else,” Williams said, since layoffs are
not an option.