ESC system provides broader global logistics view

  • Published
  • By Jason Bishop
  • 754th Electronic Systems Group
The 754th Electronic Systems Group Integrated Logistics Systems Supply team here reached a significant milestone in converting 100 bases from an older a legacy system to the modern Enterprise Solution-Supply earlier this month.

The legacy system, known as MASS, is used for locating and redistributing spare parts needed to repair mission impaired weapon systems. It was developed under a former concept of operations that considered base-assigned weapon systems rather than the entire fleet of a given type of aircraft. This led to competition between bases for limited spare parts, which may have sub-optimized fleet support.

The new process provides a broader view of global logistics support and expeditionary operations, said Scott Hunter, a functional analyst with the team.

The 100-base mark is about one third of the roughly 300 total bases targeted for the migration.

"Identifying where these parts were located and taking distribution actions was quite a cumbersome process," said Phil Waugh, ILSS Project Manager. The new process takes all the bases using the older MASS system and migrates them into a Web-based system, which is accessible through the Air Force Portal.

"We have now a modernized MASS capability" Mr. Waugh said. "This takes it to a completely different level where you go out through the Air Force Portal and access the application to inquire across all Standard Based Supply System accounts."

Not only can the users attain visibility to the entire enterprise, but they can also be sure the information available is up to date.

"You get a near-real-time answer," said Mike Hill, team systems analyst. "They had ways to do this in the past, but the data was often up to a day old."

The main driving force behind the migration of systems was supporting the end user.

"This is primarily done to support the warfighter's needs for better supply chain management," Mr. Waugh said. "Warfighters first. This is supporting the guys on the flight line; this is supporting the guys at the frontlines in the desert, and anybody supporting a weapon system who needs to go out and satisfy a high-priority requirement."

Already, the feedback from the users of the new system has been overwhelmingly positive. But this reaction wasn't didn't happen by chance.

"The system was developed with direct input from the functional users," Mr. Waugh said. "We had requirement sessions here for the development of this tool. We brought people in who have to do this everyday, and they drove the requirements. They were involved in the development. They were involved in the testing. And they were involved the evolution of it to its current state. So this wasn't done in a vacuum. This was done with direct user input. And as a result of that, when it got out in the field, it was widely accepted because the people who use it every day are the ones who helped design it."

Also with the new Web-based system, a user has only one system to learn.

"The thing that makes this such a useful tool is that no matter where you are, with the Air Force Portal, you have a single profile," Mr. Waugh said. "So you log in from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq or Langley, you're seeing the same home page, you're seeing the same ILS-S application, and you're able to go in and do the same process no matter where you are in the world. So that gives you an enterprise ubiquitous presence where you can go in and execute against one standard platform, one standard application, and not have to learn multiple different types of activities."

The universal part of the new system has other advantages as well; when moving from location to location, there's no longer a need to configure computers to work with the different mainframes.

"This is beneficial when we deploy," Mr. Hunter said. "Before, you had software that had to be installed on every PC that needed to manage high-priority orders and the maintenance. Now when somebody deploys to the desert, they just need a computer with Internet Explorer. We used to bring an analyst, a systems person with you on a deployment just to handle the configurations to use the tool. Now you can actually eliminate that."

When the migration to the new ESS reached a significant milestone earlier this month, the team noticed another very important aspect the new system provides.

"There's a secondary benefit we're seeing, which is significant reductions in our expenses because of the high overhead associated with the old system," Mr. Waugh said.

In fact, the projected cost reduction once the rest of the bases are migrated is "well over $1 million" annually, Mr. Waugh said. "You've got both enhanced productivity and low costs out of this initiative. Win-win all around."