AVIANO AIR BASE, Italy --
In a world where Airmen are
expected to do more with less, innovation is integral to helping members
achieve mission success.
Senior Airman Tyler Wandtke, 31st Logistics
Readiness Squadron aircraft parts store journeyman, used his passion for
technology to create a program that streamlines collected data and minimizes
the time to complete mission essential tasks.
“During my last assignment, I
worked at Individual Protective Equipment. Every day I would pick up Chemical Bags
and rebuild them. At the time, you had to fill out each form by hand,” Wandtke
explained. “We had to build at least 50 bags daily, which took a lot of time.
One day our office received a bar code readers and that’s when I had the idea
to generate barcodes and use Visual Basic—a Microsoft program—to input and
print information.”
Over time Wandtke advanced his
coding skills and created his new program Enterprise Solution Supply—also known
as ESSential.
“The program Airman Wandtke created
is awesome,” said Master Sgt. Sonia Magagnin, 31st LRS quality assurance
evaluator and innovation point-of-contact. “He created a program with many
feature which is very useful to the mission in a time where we are expected to
do more with less.”
In addition to serving as central
storage for data, ESSential has a stamp feature, which allows logisticians to
create and save a digital signature and the ability to research unlimited stock
numbers at once. The "Automatic Pull and Putaway" log also records
all items entering or leaving storage.
“With the ‘Create a Signature’ application
many man-hours are saved,” said Magagnin. “If there are 50 shipments waiting to
be pulled, the supply technician would have to print out two shipment documents
which would require three signatures each, making it a total of 300 signatures.
That process normally takes 45 minutes to 1.5 hours. With ESSential it can be
done in five minutes. The "Automatic Pull and Putaway" log
application saves 60 hours per week and depending on the workload as much as
300 hours per month.”
Through his knowledge acquired
during his time as an Information Technology intern, the Evansville, Indiana
native has equipped a single Airman the ability to complete tasks usually
suited for five personnel. His flight can now focus on other mission essential
tasks, such as maintaining, inspecting, and validating readiness spares
packages, supporting maintenance Field Training Deployments and maintaining 12
stockrooms.
Although ESSential has proven
useful and is utilized at other bases such as Royal Air Force Lakenheath,
England and Ramstein Air Base, Germany, Wandtke is not satisfied. He dedicates
30 to 40 hours a week to continuously improve his software.
“I want to continue progressing the
program to one day show Air Force leaders not how it is, but what it could be,”
he explained. “I don't want to only create programs for the logisticians but
for other units. I feel like it can always be better.”