Gaining Visibility

Written by Marty Kauchak

Since the USS Constitution sailed into shipyards in and around New York City to complete a partial overhaul in 1807, the military services have been responsible for conducting depot-level maintenance on their weapons platforms and other equipment. While the complexity of the equipment to be refurbished or repaired has exponentially increased in the ensuing 200 years, there are some basic, recurring functions that continue to challenge depots across the Department of Defense.

Maintaining visibility and control over new and repaired parts in depot supply bins and meeting overhaul schedules are two tasks that have caused more than a few maintainers and the owners of the platforms—the operators—some sleepless nights.

But help in fixing some of these long-standing challenges is on the way through the U.S. Army’s Depot Total Asset Visibility System (DTAVS)—a Web-based system integrated with radio frequency identification (RFID) handheld scanners and other components that give visibility to parts and components.

DTAVS, which was recently recognized by an industry association for its early performance at Anniston Army Depot (ANAD), may also find interest among other DoD components, also in need of a template for improving their depot-level maintenance processes.

THE VENUE

ANAD is the Army’s designated Center of Industrial and Technical Excellence for tracked and wheeled combat vehicles, artillery, bridging systems and small caliber weapons. The facility performs depot-level maintenance on vehicles ranging in size from the Stryker to the 70-ton M1 Abrams tank and a variety of other types in between, including the M113 family of vehicles, the M88 recovery vehicle and the M9 armored combat engineering vehicle. Major components of each vehicle are also overhauled and returned to stock.

ANAD is also the designated center for the overhaul and refurbishment of U.S. Marine Corps tracked vehicles and may also provide depot-level activities for other services’ ground platforms.

The depot’s mission and supporting business processes during the early days of the global war on terrorism made it a prime candidate to field a DTAVS-like system.

TRACKING MILLIONS OF PARTS

The intricacies of one depot mission— parts management—were placed in perspective by a depot spokesman. “Most of our maintenance programs fall along the line of once a vehicle arrives, we have to start tearing it down, reclaiming the parts, maintaining an inventory, take the thousands of parts that could come off a vehicle, and run the vehicle through a complete overhaul, refabrication and refurbishment process. The process extends throughout the entire industrial complex. So you can see how tracking the parts and having the vehicle come back together to where you will have produced say, an almost-brand new tank is so critical,” the spokesman said.

ANAD may typically be working on eight-to-10 tank programs. The number of vehicles in each program may vary greatly, between 10-or-fewer to more than 80. Factor in the programs for combat support vehicles (bridge launchers, recovery vehicles, M9 armored combat earthmovers), the M113 family of vehicles, artillery pieces, combat small arms, the Paladin self-propelled howitzer and other vehicles, and “we are trying to track millions of parts is what it amounts to,” the spokesman elaborated.

The Army’s Standard Depot System (SDS) has been the service’s legacy system for more than 40 years, enabling ANAD to manage its vehicles and their parts—with constraints.

“The legacy system was geared more toward tracking a major end item, a tank for example,” the spokesman said. “The legacy system does not accommodate both the scheduling and the marrying-up of the parts, pieces and workload below the major end item in a real-time, userfriendly format. The net effect was that we never had real-time visibility. We could usually track a part but quite often it was very reactive. When you are dealing with that volume of parts, it’s entirely possible to lose them.”

And no wonder—prior to DTAVS, storage strategies were dependent on the parts managers and material expediters literally saying, “I am putting my parts behind Building 122 in two lanes,” without any automation to record the placement much less track the movement of those parts, the ANAD spokesman said. “If you were lucky the manager had an Excel spreadsheet.”

The SDS is transitioning to the Logistics Modernization Program (LMP), with depot implementation of the new program expected around 2010. During this transition period, ANAD initiated DTAVS, which combines the attributes of the depot’s Automated Identification Technology program and wireless technology and is smoothing the transition from SDS to LMP. Though DTAVS is not part of the LMP initiative, plans are for it to interface with the next-generation system and continue to provide asset and process visibility.

TECHNOLOGY TESTBED

“What DTAVS does is employ DoD technologies so we can create baskets and box pallets with parts in them, route those parts, and most importantly provide visibility of the parts and their rework processes,” said the spokesman. “At any given instance in time we know where a given basket or pallet is. A single box-pallet may have hundreds of parts from several tanks. Additionally, at any given time we are actively tracking 80,000 active baskets and pallets. In the past, none of the systems were geared to answer: Where is it? We knew we took off a part from a tank and put it in the production process, but we also had to answer: Physically, where is it?”

Tracking parts has historically been an area in which ANAD attempted to inject new technologies to solve a very persistent problem. Immediately before the DTAVS pilot the depot was working on a prototype that used handheld scanners with globalpositioning sensor pods to provide geographic coordinates for map-overlay.

“The concept worked about 80-percent of the time. Technically it was doomed to failure due to our difficulty locking onto enough satellites for a good read-out,” the spokesman said. “We currently have several RFID prototypes which will be good candidates for DTAVS-III and DTAVS-III+ revisions. Passive RFID will be a technology of choice for scanning inside our new power train facility, and it could do the same for DTAVS-III and -III+ when we’ve got the process-to-process enhancements up and running.”

INDUSTRY’S PART

DTAVS was initiated in June 2005 under a Phase I pilot contract. An industry team, consisting of Portal Dynamics, Teamcor, Robbins Gioia, Intermec and HL Group, established the DTAVS hardware and supporting infrastructure at the depot during this phase.

Sheree Harness, solutions delivery manager for Portal Dynamics, said that by October 1, just a few months after the work began on the pilot, “we went live with one of their vehicle programs. From there, Anniston had a phased-implementation as the command rolled DTAVS out across the depot, for all vehicle platforms and for all other programs, such as small arms.”

The DTAVS Phase II contract, which covers maintenance and support work, began in October 2006 and expires on Oct. 31, 2007. Portal Dynamics was the sole vendor for this phase. Contractor support was provided by four, full-time personnel at the depot and two, part-time personnel who provided project and program management support.

“We continued to maintain the Visual Planner System by increasing its functionality, by supporting the user’s change requests, and building in some additional reporting and analytical capabilities,” Harness said.

From the contractor’s perspective, there was a degree of accomplishment with its team’s efforts through Phase II. “We can actually look around the depot and see the impact DTAVS is having,” said Rich McAdams, Portal Dynamics’ practice manager. “You can see the baskets of parts and the holding areas and how they are more organized now—with fewer parts just stacked around the building. The depot team has a much better understanding of what it has, so it doesn’t need to have as much on hand. The team can reach out and grab any given part because it knows where it is and the inventory and inventory process is reduced significantly.”

From the government’s perspective, DTAVS is fully operational at the completion of Phase II—able to track baskets and parts, building to building around the ANAD complex.

Portal Dynamics’ one-year extension (with options for three additional years) on the existing contract will begin November 1, 2007. DTAVS Phase III is designed for ongoing program improvement. Whereas the government customer previously gained visibility of material on a building-to-building level, “under Phase III we are going to be altering the application to move to a processto- process tracking level,” revealed Harness.

Intermec and HL Group will be rejoining the industry team under a separate contract.

NEXT APPLICATION

DTAVS will eventually interface with the internal tracking system at the new power train facility being built at ANAD.

Anytime parts leave the new facility to be worked on in the existing industrial complex, there will be a seamless hand off to DTAVS. DTAVS will, in turn, push status information back to the new power train facility any time one of the pallets and basket is scanned for movement or to indicate that a process step has been completed.

“The effect will be total visibility between the systems. Interfaces have already been written,” according to the depot spokesman.

But this and earlier successes did not come easy.

CULTURAL RESISTANCE

The major impediment to implementing DTAVS was the cultural resistance to the winds of change that were generated by the system’s implementation. Many long-time employees worked with individual processes that required manual manipulation. “This was a quantum leap with the technology in the eyes of many,” the spokesman said. The government-industry team’s ability to overcome cultural resistance and challenges has not gone unnoticed by at least one body that is a proponent for organizational excellence.

RECOGNITION

In September, the Washington, D.C.-based Association for Enterprise Integration bestowed on ANAD and DTAVS its Excellence in Enterprise Integration Award for Government.

The award description reads in part that ANAD’s “deployment of this innovative system has allowed the depot to inject technology which both interfaces existing legacy systems and greatly amplifies lean manufacturing and six sigma efforts, within production value streams and across the entire physical complex.”

While the association’s management and judges declined to comment on this specific award, they called attention to the farranging criteria on which the nominated projects were judged: innovation, strategic effect, customer value, financial impact, operational consequence and cultural change. ♦