RAFM puts sortie generations under AFSO 21 scope

  • Published
  • By Senior Airman Clark Staehle
  • 100th Air Refueling Wing Public Affairs
RAF Mildenhall --  At a sortie-generation event held here last week, Airmen from all over RAF Mildenhall used Air Force Smart Operations for the 21st Century principles to examine the way the base produces KC-135 missions.

"Our business case was to look at increasing our sortie-generation rate within existing manpower," said Mark Stokes, Intergraph system consultant on Lean processes, who flew in from the U.S. to help with the process. "We wanted to go from 67 percent, where we currently are, to 80 percent without going outside our current manpower restrictions while maintaining our health-of-the-fleet indicators."

Air Force leaders say AFSO 21 works for all Air Force processes and could be applied to anything from how the mail is delivered on base to how the armory issues weapons.

The process begins by identifying and mapping a procedure as it runs currently, including every detail and piece of support for that function. That's known as the current state - or the where the process stands today.

Next, the parties involved brainstorm to streamline a process without any time, money or manpower restraints. That's called the ideal state and it represents how a process would be improved or run in a perfect world.

Then compromises are made between the current and ideal states to come up with a viable solution that can be implemented in three to six months. The team identified 20 action items or events to move from the current to future states over the next six months.

The 100th Maintenance Group commander, Col. Michael Saville, said that if the process could be made more reasonably efficient, the wing could launch more planes a day, which in turn will refuel more planes, which will ultimately better support Airmen,
Soldiers, Sailors and Marines on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The mission statement of the wing is to provide air refueling combat power," he said. "We are going to be able to provide more air refueling combat power if we are able to streamline this process. The real benefactor of us providing more combat power is the war fighter."

Airmen representing each step in the process attended the meeting, from maintainers to boom operators. Every step was documented, brainstormed and discussed.

"We mapped the current, ideal and future state and we wanted an implementation plan to get from that current state to that future state and we accomplished that as well," Mr. Stokes said. "And then our next goal is to get to 80 percent. So we've accomplished everything except for 80 percent and we hope to accomplish that over the next year."