Advanced planning and scheduling - Supply Support: Air Force Spares Campaign

Air Force Journal of Logistics, Fall, 2002 by Maryann Kaczmarek, Bobbi LaRue, Duane Anderson, Robert Owen, William Warren, Larry Waite, Tina Womack

To capitalize on the momentum of the logistics transformation Demand Planning Pathfinder at Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center (OC-ALC), Oklahoma, an Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) Pathfinder effort was launched in February 2002. Advanced planning and scheduling is an off-the-shelf technology used for supply chain planning and decision support functions in a variety of commercial manufacturing, distribution, maintenance, and repair environments and, generally, has resulted in significant improvements to supply chain order fulfillment, cycle time, and cost efficiency.

The APS Pathfinder initiative will evaluate APS capabilities and limitations in an Air Force maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) environment and support an implementation decision by Air Force leadership. Secondary objectives of the APS Pathfinder include the development of functional and technical documentation (data maps, process maps, training requirements, roles, and responsibilities) necessary to support APS implementation if such a decision is made by Air Force leadership.

The Demand Planning Pathfinder highlighted a key technical gap in the Air Force--a single system or even a group of systems that can adequately plan requirements for spares and provide an integrated and comparative view of supply chain decisionmaking information in areas such as:

* Difference between planned and actual performance in the supply chain

* Real-time visibility of changes in the spares pipeline

* Ability to see and evaluate the impact of adjusted inventory levels

* Simultaneous assessment of both buy and repair requirements

* Ability to identify sources of requirements from various operational customers

* Ability to compare both depot-level repair and Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) requirements to funding needs

The current requirement processes and systems tools are unable to adequately identify which conditions contribute to spares shortfalls, impair logistical support to the warfighter, and adversely affect weapon systems availability. The Air Force has several good pinpoint solutions that perform some of these functions. However, integrating these data in a way that allows management to make rapid decisions on how to maximize limited resources to obtain the best possible weapon systems availability is not possible with these pinpoint solutions.

Currently, the Air Force prime item managers are reviewing Engine Supportability Asset Management Plan (ESAMP) listings to identify current and potential supply shortfalls for 30 to 120 days out. Generated over a 3-week span, the Reparability and Forecast Module (RFM) provides the Air Force prime item manager with the ESAMP listing. Using the ESAMP listing, the item manager begins a very labor-intensive process using the Secondary Item Requirements System (D200A), Item Manager Wholesale Requisition Process (DO35A), or Wholesale and Retail Receiving and Shipping (DO35K) data, often accessed through the Navy Supply Maintenance Aviation Reengineering Team (SMART [OC-ALC-developed data warehouse]), Execution and Prioritization of Repair Support System (EXPRESS [for EXPRESS-managed items]), and phone calls to the scheduler for projections of repair to validate the RFM listing. DLA consumables are worked by retail item managers using a similar process and could consume up to 30 percent of their time. With advanced planning and scheduling software, managers will be able to generate automated reports on demand for review of asset supportability in daily, monthly, quarterly, and even yearly outlooks. In addition, managers will be able to create reports using several different user-defined criteria. In this regard, the APS Pathfinder initiative is closely aligned to the demand planning concept.

APS software was designed to work in tandem with either Manufacturing Resource Planning II/Enterprise Resource Planning (MRPII/ERP) software or corporate legacy systems to allow analysis of current and historical information and, thereby, permit examination of numerous possible alternatives before determining the most feasible plan that will support customer requirements. This fully integrated functionality enables the rapid, repetitive modeling and collaboration of supply chain-related functions, inside and outside an enterprise, for functions such as forecasting, inventory and distribution planning, and rough-cut capacity planning.

The Air Force APS Pathfinder effort is a proof of concept, applying APS software within the Fl01 engine community at OC-ALC. The pilot is structured to provide information necessary for implementation planning and decisionmaking, testing the functional benefits and technical fit within the Air Force environment, and enabling collaboration with DLA and the original equipment manufacturers.

The intent of the APS Pathfinder is to validate an APS capability for creating a single logistics, system-planning baseline that integrates the various functional efforts (forecasting, inventory and distribution planning, maintenance and production planning) that are currently fragmented across a number of individual organizations, processes, and information systems. The APS Pathfinder endeavors to provide an automated, alerts-based capability to identify, examine, and resolve logistics system constraints by exception (parts availability, physical capacity, and financial restrictions) before they impact production and establish a mechanism for sharing information and supporting collaborative planning capabilities across the extended supply chain (for example, DLA and original equipment manufacturers).