Keeping up the fleet: improving maintenance of military gear requires access to information.

• Author: Pappalardo, Joe

With a growing backlog of equipment repair and maintenance work, the U.S. military services and contractors are finding that, in order to expedite the job, they need computer systems that can share information across the supply chain.

"We've got to have an information system that has visibility all the way back to the depots. We don't have that today," said Col. William Crosby, Army project manager for cargo helicopters. "I submit now that the system is broken."

Better information means better communication between maintainers on the front lines and depots, better tracking of replacement components, more awareness of the history of parts and restructuring the work to eliminate waste.

The private sector has created efficiency by identifying bottlenecks, using analysis to expose waste in manufacturing processes and changing work conditions by rearranging working spaces, shipping components only on demand and reducing parts movement within machine shops. Military experts say that treating the supply chain in the same way could help streamline the clumsy, frequently disconnected military process.

What started as methods to trim time and costs in the private sector are being transferred to the military, although changes have been "personality driven," rather than organizational, said Crosby at a conference sponsored by the Institute for Defense and Government Advancement.

By implementing business practices and technologies available in the private sector, the Defense Department could bring much needed efficiencies to the logistics process, experts said. For example, a front line maintainer would approach a broken machine and be able to know, with a simple scanning device, its maintenance history, hours deployed in the field, home depot and manufacturer. Each part could likewise be scanned. If the maintainer in the field could not determine a solution, he could appeal to experts at depots or even liaisons at the manufacturing level. If a particularly enlightening solution is found to a recurring problem, electronic manuals could be updated overnight, in preparation for the next maintainer facing a similar problem.

Such a system is far off. But that hasn't stopped military maintenance experts from taking the first steps in that direction, said Dennis Wightman, program manager at the Logistics Management Institute.

"The [Defense Department] is trying to put into place the tools that would allow maintainers to beam back images and be directed in the proper repair of an item," he said. "There's an awful lot of emphasis on this in the electronic age, and I think we'll see more of it."

The logisticians and maintainers of all services worry that budget constraints will again lead to pressures to reduce costs, even as combat makes their job increasingly demanding.

In the Air Force, for example, spare-parts funding is up and...