Subscribe to the Free Print Edition!
Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 10/11/04 issue

Air Force expands parts tracking app to other must-have data

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

Air Force Knowledge Services can analyze aircraft uptime so efficiently that the Air Force is expanding it to other kinds of intelligence.

CIO John Gilligan called it “a foundational piece of our future architecture. All the information relevant to the enterprise will be in AFKS.”

It is “one of the larger government enterprise warehouses that we’re aware of,” said Gary Ahrens, a vice president of BearingPoint Inc. of McLean, Va., which worked on the implementation.

Pulling material from 26 databases and information systems, the data warehousing service rapidly summarizes key metrics, such as how many aircraft are ready to fly at any given time.

Commanders access the tool through the Air Force portal, at www.my.af.mil, to get a quick visual summary of equipment readiness. Analysts can do ad hoc queries to generate reports. AFKS currently provides about 20,000 summaries a week.

“We used to have several people analyzing data for six months, and now one person can do it in a few minutes,” Gilligan said.

The Air Force is no stranger to enterprisewide IT, but what’s new about AFKS is the way it aggregates data from multiple existing systems.

“If you wanted to look at maintenance data, you could see maintenance data,” AFKS program manager Eric Wilson said. “But if you wanted to look at maintenance data with supply data, you would have to take output from both systems and work it into your own Microsoft Excel or Access application. It was very time-consuming.”

Data aggregation is increasingly important to assess readiness, he said.

“If I’m looking at what it takes for an airplane to be mission-capable, I’m looking at maintenance data, supply data and a host of other things,” Wilson said. “In the past we just haven’t had the opportunity to get that data together.”

Spotting trends

The Materiel Systems Group of the Air Force’s Enterprise Systems Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, brought AFKS online in 2002. The program’s first goal was to aggregate maintenance information from five base-level maintenance systems. Each company’s maintenance team knew what bedeviled their own aircraft but, across the service, there was no way to show trends, such as faulty parts arriving from a manufacturer.

More news on related topics: Business Process Management, Content / Record Management, Executive Center, Great Managers, IT in Action, Knowledge Management, Management, IT Management