Personal property one-time-only shipments automated

Translog: Journal of Military Transportation Management, Jan-Feb, 2002

Thousands of service members worldwide have received the personal assistance of Shannon Worrell--and have never learned her name.

Each year, Worrell processes between 4,000 and 5,000 one-time-only personal property moves.

Until recently, Worrell did her work the old-fashioned way: manually.

The actions were critically important. One-time-only moves are international personal property shipments that go to, or from, non-controlled rate areas--typically, remote assignment regions, such as Africa and Southwest Asia.

A flood of e-mail messages and faxed requests have dominated the one-time-only section of Worrell and Angela Aguirre, who provides assistance.

Now, since Sept. 7, all personal property shipping offices have the capability to process one-time-only moves via automation, through the Transportation Operational Personal Property Standard System.

"My work responsibility remains the same," said Worrell. "However, I am now able to concentrate more on the overview of the system, and provide quality assurance in the process."

The implementation of this automation will reduce response time back to the requesting personal property shipping offices, and decrease the volume of incomplete or erroneous one-time-only requests previously submitted to MTMC.

"We started with the premise that there had to be a better way to process one-time-only moves," said Collier. "It represented an absolutely crushing workload. It didn't make sense to have so much manual work in an automated world."

The automation process for submission and processing of bids was completed first. During this time, Dave Mullineaux took over the task to complete full automation between personal property shipping offices and MTMC. In the last year, tests were made of automated one-time-only moves at five personal property shipping offices.

"Now, instead of all the tedious keypunch processing, I can concentrate on assuring quality and meeting the suspense dates set by the requesting personal property shipping offices," said Worrell.