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