Linking Engineering and Sustainment
Written by Peter Buxbaum
MLF 2009 Volume: 3 Issue: 9 (October)
Once the United States began to operate in those far-flung environments, the challenges to military logistics and sustainment contractors have multiplied. Now, they must provide support for systems, not only stateside or in established garrisons in Germany, but halfway around the world in places without established supporting infrastructures.
Time and distance are two, but perhaps not the most severe, of these challenges. Often, contractors must operate alongside military personnel in austere and non-permissive environments, away from the comforts of home, family, and business-as-usual, and in locations where they place themselves in danger of being injured or killed by enemy combatants.
Military contractors have demonstrated their dedication to providing the support required of them and have implemented solutions that allow them to cope with the challenges they face, while maintaining the high level of performance required of them under their contracts.
“As with our customers in the Air Force, we face the twin tyrannies of time and distance,” said Howard “Foot” Ingersoll, director of C-17 Field Services at Boeing. “Our people in Qatar are 10 hours ahead of us. The time problem is aligning everyone’s battle rhythm so that we’re not waking people up when we shouldn’t.
“The distance problem involves getting stuff— spare parts, pens and pencils, paperwork—out to remote locations,” Ingersoll added. “We’re hampered by distance when there are not well-established and well-oiled methods of getting equipment and people out to deployed locations.”
When contractors are at the mercy of military transportation systems, they must also cope with sets of priorities over which they have no control. “When in theater you are competing for airlift assets to cover your requirements,” said Karl Purdy, technical services manager for the Hunter unmanned aerial vehicle program at Northrop Grumman. “There’s always an increased risk that the precious parts you need are lower priority than someone else’s.”
For Steve Geary, president of Supply Chain Visions Inc., a consultancy headquartered in Stoneham, Mass., time and distance are less of a challenge than is the environment. “Contractors trying to provide product support in forward locations are always confronted with two nasty issues: is it an austere environment and is it a nonpermissive environment,” he said. “In an austere environment, you can’t go down the block to get a spare part or a tool. There is little in the way of a communications or transportation infrastructure to rely on. You are running detached.
“The challenge of non-permissive environments is one of safety,” Geary continued. “If you are in a dangerous area, how do you protect your people and provide the warfighter with the support he or she deserves?”
Ingersoll’s operation provides support for maintenance and sustainment of the C-17 transport aircraft with people stationed alongside their Air Force counterparts at bases in Qatar and Turkey as well as at points within Iraq and Afghanistan. Boeing provides three services at these bases: supply, engineering, and engine management.
“We are in a support role for the Air Force,” he explained. “They do a magnificent job operating, maintaining and sustaining aircraft under austere conditions. We are there to help them.”
Boeing’s supply function involves getting spare parts to where they are needed on time. Boeing functions as the exclusive inventory control point (ICP) for parts peculiar to the C-17. Other parts are managed by the Defense Logistics Agency, the air logistics commands, and Navy supply entities. Boeing’s responsibility includes maintaining $850 million in inventory for 88,000 line items.
“In essence we are conducting the duties and responsibilities for like agencies within the U.S. government,” said Robert Tomilowicz, Boeing’s executive director for supply chain management in Southern California, which includes responsibility for the C-17. “We identify requirements and needs, placing orders for parts, arrange for the movement and delivery of those parts, and establish levels of inventory at all locations where the C-17 aircraft could be based.”
Boeing stages inventory for Southwest Asia at the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar as well as at points in Iraq and Afghanistan. “We ensure that as demands occur, that material is moved and staged forward,” said Tomilowicz. “Where it is a grounding condition on the aircraft, we make sure that we get the part there as expeditiously as possible.”
Thinking through an inventory strategy is an important part of supporting forward deployed operations, said Geary. “You don’t have local resources you can rely on,” he explained, “and that means you have to accept the fact you have to be nimble and improvisational. “A lot of support strategies have morphed rather rapidly,” he added. “We grew up with a Cold War mentality where we had a warehouse full of parts in West Germany. It’s different when you go expeditionary. This aspect of product support is something everyone is learning under real-life conditions.”
Boeing relies exclusively on military transport for delivery of the C-17 parts it manages, and must rely on the timing and availability of military resources. “We try to mitigate the risk of time and distance by pre-positioning forward as much material as demanded by units in theater,” said Tomilowicz. “Warfighters can just go to the warehouse in theater rather than having to ship parts thousands of miles.”
The engineering function Boeing provides involves advising Air Force personnel on troubleshooting non-routine problems with aircraft. “If an airplane comes in that has a problem that is not in the tech orders or manuals, the Air Force comes to us for on-scene advice,” said Ingersoll. “Our forward- deployed personnel provide an engineering disposition. This service has proved to be very responsive and flexible, and warfighters like it a lot.”
The engine management function involves ensuring that the engines hung on a particular aircraft are suited for the mission they are about to face. “If you know an aircraft is going out on a 25-day mission with 37 stops along the way, you don’t want an engine that is old and is going to need to be changed,” said Ingersoll. “We provide our customer with data and trending analysis so that we can assure them that if they send out an aircraft with these four engines, they won’t have to stop for engine removal or change.”
Boeing performs this work under a performance based logistics (PBL) contract, in which the contractor is paid based on the achievement of required performance levels. “The main metric in the contract is to maintain aircraft availability as high as possible,” said Ingersoll. “The Air Force doesn’t tell us how to do it. That allows us the flexibility to use our resources and people as best we can.”
Boeing also has its own internal metrics that are not part of a contract award fee. If an aircraft is grounded for lack of a part, the company is committed to getting that part where it is needed within 48 hours, 80 percent of the time. “We typically beat those times,” said Ingersoll. “Our numbers are up in the high 99 percent area, and we often get parts delivered in 24 hours or less.”
PBLs are currently used to support around 20 percent of major weapons systems, according to Geary. “PBLs work wonderfully in these environments because they fundamentally align the incentive structure so that everyone is driving for the same goal.” Performance expectations must be adjusted for the environment, however.
Northrop Grumman’s Hunter contract is also a PBL arrangement. The company’s performance is measured based on flight hours per aircraft per month as well as the number of aircraft that are mission-capable at any given time, according to Purdy. “We are far exceeding the readiness rates expected of us,” he said.
Northrop Grumman supports the Hunter by collocating subject matter experts with the customers who provide maintenance operations. In an example of a government-run/contractor-operated arrangement, the entire site, which is located in Iraq, is run by Northrop Grumman, and has been for over two years. Revitalization of the Hunter UAV, which involves a periodic refurbishment of the aircraft from nose to tail, is performed exclusively by Northrop Grumman personnel outside of the continental United States.
Commenting on Northrop Grumman’s Hunter PBL, Purdy said, “This arrangement has allowed us to come up with options to ensure that our guys out in the field have everything they need,” he said.
One innovative solution Northrop Grumman came up with was to bypass the military transportation system in favor of contracting for deliveries with the commercial carriers FedEx and DHL. “We were able to come up with a solution that turns out now to be cheaper than the military airlift approach we had been using,” said Purdy. “They go deep enough into the theater so that once the parts get to the forward supply location we can get them out to our guys at their remote sites through the normal military transportation system. It turns out that, all things considered, we can ship an engine for $2,000 cheaper than we could before.”
Boeing has also initiated some innovations to help its personnel operate effectively in forward locations. “We came up with a Webbased method of providing engineering dispositions,” said Ingersoll. “Air Force personnel anywhere in the world can ask a question about something unusual that happened to an aircraft by navigating to a Website and requesting an engineering disposition. Our engineers wherever they are deployed around the world, can come up with an answer and approve it if they have the right certification. Sometimes one engineer, who may be based in Turkey, provides the solution, and another engineer, possibly based in Australia or Alaska, gives the approval.”
But the hardest problem does not exist in the virtual world, but it is in getting physical parts to physical locations where they are needed. “Getting parts to airplanes,” said Ingersoll. “That’s the tallest pole in the tent.”
Once it is determined that a C-17-unique part is needed, which is decided by the Tanker Airlift Control Center at Scott Air Force Base in conjunction with Boeing, Boeing locates the part in its system and arranges transportation of the part through the Air Force. Non-C-17 parts are usually sourced through the Defense Logistics Agency or one of the air logistics centers at Warner Robins, Tinker, or Ogden Air Force bases. The Air Force’s Global Logistics Supply Center gets the part into the Air Force transportation system for delivery to the forward location.
Boeing also assists the Air Force with computerized research on parts availability for grounded aircraft and with returning retrograde parts directly to vendors for repair. “Our people are bonded to write field purchase orders to get the part right to vendor and into the repair cycle quicker,” said Ingersoll.
Military logistics is not only about parts and processes, but it is also about people. The human factor comes to the fore especially when contractor personnel must accompany their military customers to austere, forward positions. “We try to limit our people’s separation from their families to 45 to 60 days at a time so that it is not so onerous,” said Ingersoll. “Unless you know you’re going to be gone for a year, most people are ready to come home after about 60 days of being separated from their families.”
That is especially so since Boeing contractors are subject to the same conditions as their military counterparts. “If the Air Force people are sleeping in tents at Al Udeid, then our people sleep in tents,” said Ingersoll, “and not in some five-star hotel downtown. We don’t want our people to be perceived as prima donnas.”
Not that the contacting personnel are complaining. “Our folks are very supportive of the Air Force and of the young men and women fixing the airplanes,” said Ingersoll. “They all come back saying it is an honor working with them.” ♦