Air Force announces depot strategy

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Air Force officials recently announced their Depot Maintenance Strategy and Master Plan for the years 2004 to 2020, charting a new course for how the service's three air logistics centers will support America's warfighters.

The strategy calls for increased investment in both the depot infrastructure and the organic depot workforce, increased reliance on public-private partnering and process improvements in depot business practices. The strategy's goals are for the Air Force to maintain a highly qualified depot workforce, get aircraft through the depot process quicker with increased quality, obtain a properly sized infrastructure, reduce cost and improve financial management.

"During the past 10 years, the Air Force has not invested adequately in maintaining the basic infrastructure of the depots: the physical facilities, machinery, equipment, training and development of its personnel," said Nelson Gibbs, assistant secretary of the Air Force for installations, environment and logistics. "So, they have not kept pace with advances that occurred in the commercial sector of the business."

Long-range depot strategy will help rectify the situation, said Gen. Lester Lyles, Air Force Materiel Command commander.

"The strategy is a means to focus the Air Force and Air Force Materiel Command on how to retain these as viable depots and effectively and efficiently support the warfighter," he said.

With that focus in mind, Lyles said implementing the strategy will require the overall depot investment level to increase to nearly $150 million a year for 2004 to 2009. This equates to a new total investment of $900 million above that previously planned.

"The commitment of the Air Force senior leadership to provide the funds needed for investment in the depots indicates how important they are and how strong support for them is," Lyles said.

According to Gibbs, the new investment will not come out of the money major commands pay to get maintenance work done.

"It's coming as a direct investment into the depots," Gibbs said. "It's not related to a particular job, so the guy who's sending his F-100 engine in to be overhauled isn't paying for this in the price. Whether we were doing this or not, he'd pay the same price."

This increase will bring investment in the depots up to the industry average of approximately 6 percent of revenue, allowing the depots to keep pace with technological advances and replace aging facilities and equipment.

The depots had not been provided adequate investment capital during much of the '90s and Air Force officials are now trying to get to the point it should have been, Gibbs said.

"We said we should be investing at the same level that industry is. The Air Force has been investing a little less than 3 percent of its equivalent in sales," he said. "To get it up to 6 percent we needed about another $150 million a year."

Under the strategy, workload for the Air Force's three depots -- at Robins Air Force Base, Ga.; Tinker Air Force Base, Okla.; and Hill Air Force Base, Utah, -- will include core workload and core-plus workload.

Core work is that which must be maintained in Air Force depots to meet readiness and sustainability requirements of contingency scenarios. Core-plus is additional workload needed to make the depots more efficient and effective.

AFMC experts said core-plus work is assigned to depots using a "best value" analysis in comparison to private sources of repair. Core-plus also includes capabilities that industry cannot provide because the work is old, low-volume and unprofitable.

By incorporating enterprise management, the depot strategy provides a way for the Air Force to manage depots as corporate assets consistent with the needs of the enterprise as a whole. Enterprise management integrates depot planning into the Air Force strategic planning and programming process and provides an integrated approach for maintaining the Air Force depot infrastructure, equipment and workforce over the long term.

This broader perspective helps promote greater commonality across weapon systems, introduce advanced technology into the depot repair processes, and reduce life-cycle costs.

The strategy also calls for increased partnering with industry to use the capabilities of both the public and private sectors to take advantage of what each does best. This approach, when well planned and properly leveraged, offers the Air Force improved lifetime performance and sustainment, according to strategy experts.

The depot strategy involves taking steps to implement partnering agreements earlier in the planning for new systems and equipment. The objective is to plan for these agreements during the next 24 to 36 months for all major acquisitions.

"The direction the Air Force is headed is to partner with industry to provide the best, most reliable service at the cheapest cost, and we need both the depots and industry to be able to do that more effectively from a financial point of view," Gibbs said. "We want to minimize the duplication and redundancies, so the strategy we're following is to encourage more depot-industry partnerships."

The strategy also incorporates the ongoing Depot Maintenance Re-engineering and Transformation effort. This has already resulted in a single organization being created at each air logistics center, focused solely on depot-level maintenance.

The new organization's goal is efficient, effective, high-quality depot-level maintenance, AFMC depot experts said. It provides clear alignment of accountability, responsibility and authority.

DMRT covers eight areas including organization structure, which led to the depot maintenance reorganization. Other areas include workload and production, financial management, workforce, material support, infrastructure, information technology and metrics.

"Retaining the depots is not just an AFMC issue, it's an Air Force issue," Lyles said. "The strategy gives us a cohesive approach with buy-in at all levels.

"It offers a fundamental change on both industrial and business processes. The master plan postures the Air Force depots to support new weapon system technologies, as well as aging systems."

According to Gibbs, depot experts have already begun implementing some changes.

"It's complementary to what we have in the strategy and in the master plan," Gibbs said. "So, we're already beginning to see some of the benefits of those activities."

When asked what differences the operational commands will see 10 years from now, Gibbs said, "They'll say, '10 years ago when we used to send these things in, we'd get them back 270 days later. Now, we get them back in 140 days and have less squawks when we get them back.

"It's really a pleasure to do business with these guys now. We can rely on them, they give us a quality product on the date they said we were going to get it,'" Gibbs said. "If they can say that, then we will have achieved a primary goal." (Courtesy of AFMC News Service)