FOCUS GOVERNMENT
Issue 19, January 2012
LOGISTICS MANAGEMENT REAL TIME Yevgeniy Sverdlik looks at how the US Navy is shipping in the big guns when it comes to data
BIG DATA MAKES US NAVY’S FLEET
US Navy aircraft carriers USS Ronald Reagan, USS Kitty Hawk and USS Abraham Lincoln sail in a 15-ship formation in the Philippine Sea. Image courtesy of the US Navy.
wisely. For the US Naval Air Systems Command (NavAir), big data, and the ability to process and use it, has offered a way to optimize the use of its resources.
T
Technology has changed the way asset management has traditionally been viewed by the Navy, says Chris Hammond, a commander at NavAir and deputy manager for NavAir program Deckplate (Decision Knowledge Programming Technical
Teradata-based
Evaluation). data
for Logistics Analysis and Deckplate is a system
warehousing
NavAir put in to centralize and streamline the way it manages its fleet of aircraft and aircraft carriers deployed around the world.
Hammond spoke about Deckplate at an October Teradata
partner conference with
Lisa Clark, senior VP of Spalding Consulting. NavAir has retained Spalding for logistics support at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland, where Deckplate lives.
A LARGE BUT AGILE FLEET
About 50,000 Navy personnel are deployed at any one time, Hammond says. Its fleet counts about 11 aircraft
carriers, most of
them nuclear-propulsion vessels that stay out at sea for extended periods of time without
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he US defence budget is notoriously large. Still, the resources for each department within the military have a limit and need to be managed
refuelling. Deckplate is used to manage this fleet during both military and humanitarian missions. The Navy normally leads the charge on US humanitarian missions because of its ability to dispatch resources anywhere in the world quickly, Hammond says.
Aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and about 100 aircraft and 1,000 marines, for example, were at the site of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant left damaged and leaking radiation
following the March earthquake
and tsunami in Japan within 11 days of the mission’s start. Deckplate was used to determine readiness of the fleet operating in the area. The system also provided real-time data on the danger of radiation exposure by the Navy’s assets during this time.
ENTERPRISE-WIDE VISIBILITY
The system uses about 23 years of trend analysis of aircraft readiness. Deckplate data subjects include flight usage and inventory, aircraft maintenance, configuration baseline management,
engine total asset technical directives and supply cost.
“That’s a lot of data on a lot of aircraft,” Hammond says.
The system provides
enterprise-wide visibility. “We can see where the assets are. We can see the resources expended. We can tell how many hours we’re flying on a given day. We can tell which airplanes flew every day.”
visibility,
“If an airplane is not airborne, something else has to give. So we want to make sure that that soldier or airman on the ground has the asset covered.” The system can uncover potential reasons like incorrect recent maintenance, a training issue or a component issue.
It also does daily readiness reporting, a process for messages going out every day from an aircraft
carrier deployed at sea
about the status of the aircraft it is carrying. Back around 2004, these reports would be correlated monthly, put on a DVD and sent to the commanders to tell them what the readiness status was. Deckplate has made this a live real-time reporting process.
CONSTANT PROCESS OPTIMIZATION
NavAir also uses Deckplate for on-going improvements
of its processes. A recent
Deckplate project is to provide data that will enable the command to address problems pro-actively, before they occur, which the traditional reporting process did not allow for. The system now provides access to real-time comprehensive
measurements Naval Aviation Enterprise.
For example, the data can be used to compare supply with demand for components, highlighting: “What’s out there? What got broke? How often was it required and why? Was it a problem deeper in the aircraft that caused that component to fail or was it an
across the
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