Army Sustainment VOLUME 46, ISSUE 5 | Page 55

TOOLS Changing the System to Optimize Throughput  Chief Warrant Officer 2 Keith T. Graham By E arly in my 2013 deployment to Afghanistan with the 201st Brigade Support Battalion, I had a late night conversation with my platoon leader, 2nd Lt. Sheldon Seaborn, a systems management graduate of West Point. He made the comment, “It is all about the system,” which stuck with me throughout the deployment and became especially relevant as we engaged in a problem related to customer wait time for critical communications parts. The Mission The 201st Brigade Support Battalion’s electronic maintenance shop was tasked to provide electronic maintenance support for the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, Combined Task Force (CTF) Duke, which was located in Zabul province in Regional Command South. Like most units deploying toward the end of Operation Enduring Freedom, the electronic maintenance shop was understaffed; it had only four Soldiers to replace 12 Soldiers from the outgoing unit. This team consisted of one military occupational specialty (MOS) 94F (special electronic device repairer), one MOS 94E (radio and communications security repairer), and two MOS 94A (land combat electronic missile system repairer) Soldiers. This small staff was responsible for the area’s electronic maintenance of special electronics, communication devices, night-vision devices, commercial offthe-shelf products, and the Blue Force Tracking (BFT) systems. To improve efficiency with a smaller staff, I had to improve processes and build a cohesive team. What do you do when system improvements are needed with a reduced staff? I chose to reach out to my mentors and peers in the field to see if they could help me make a positive change. Improving Outcomes I immediately noticed a deficiency in the maintenance procedures for providing ongoing maintenance support for BFT systems. Customer units typically had to deadline vehicles for about two to three days when system disk drives required rewriting or when line replaceable units (LRUs) had to be requisitioned through the supply system. Deadlines of two to three days were simply unacceptable. I instructed the electronic maintenance shop team to begin building an inventory of disk drives with the latest software upgrade and frequently replaced LRUs. We expanded our inventory to include over 75 disk drives, six computers, keyboards, and display units for the BFT system. The improved system that I implemented was based on a “float” concept similar to that used by major corporations to minimize downtime. (A float is a system or subsystem that is kept in stock to replace a broken item while repairs are being made). Under the new system, efficiency was increased, reducing downtime from three days to less than two hours. What Was Different? The old system required a work order through the maintenance shop. After the work order was produced, the wait time to receive the new equipment was seven days or more. With the improved system, a normal work order was produced and the LRUs were immediately replaced at the electronic maintenance shop with a float. The vehicle never hit the deadline report. While the unit used the float, the electronic maintenance shop made the needed repairs to the unit’s equipment. The same float concept was used when disk drives required software upgrades. The result was that the electronic maintenance shop preserved CTF Duke’s combat power throughout Forward Operating Base Apache by improving the combat vehicle deadline rate. Networking for Greater Change Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to tap into your network. As it turned out, one of my peers had a similar problem with deadlin