In August, the United States Marine Corps tapped NCMS Educational Services to produce a pair of high-impact promotional videos highlighting the Corps’ Sense and Respond Logistics initiative. “Sense and Respond is a robust new approach to tackling issues of maintenance, readiness, and lethality,” said Bob Appleton of R.W. Appleton & Associates, a chief project consultant. “It will allow the Marine Corps to be better prepared, quicker to the fight, and highly accountable for all equipment. We turned to NCMS to develop two short videos that communicate the value of this philosophy.” 

NCMS Educational Services is the multimedia development and knowledge transfer arm of the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences. “We have produced several exciting, kinetic videos for a wide array of clients in the past,” said Bill Chenevert, General Manager of Educational Services. “This time the team really took the project far beyond what anyone was expecting. Five days of location shooting, major special effects shots; it was our most ambitious video project yet.” 

The first video, debuted at the Modern Day Marine Symposium in late September, highlighted the four key elements of Sense and Respond: Asset Tracking, Serialized Item Management, Condition-Based Maintenance, and Total Lifecycle Management. Each of these foundational elements are triggered by the application of Item Unique Identifier (IUID) tags to all equipment. Once tagged, a simple hand scanner allows every end item to be tracked and monitored across its entire lifecycle, creating a holistic maintenance opportunity and a centralized data access point for all materiel.

The second video will debut at the DoD Maintenance Symposium in Phoenix on October 26-29, retelling the story of Sense and Respond and IUID as a backdrop to live presentations. “I cannot tell you what an incredible journey this has been thus far,” said Major Brian Spooner, Ground Ordnance Maintenance Officer for the Marine Corps. "I wish everyone could come to Phoenix to watch our team dazzle the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the DoD leadership, as well as the very senior leadership within all of the Armed Forces. We absolutely would not have been able to pull off such a professional product without the NCMS team.” 

Originally tasked with developing e-Learning tools for corporations, NCMS Educational Services has dynamically branched out into video and multimedia production, creative services, web development, and games-based learning applications.

For more information please contact:  

NCMS Program Manager Bill Chenevert at (734) 995-7989 or billc@ncms.org

The EWIS project is an example of how NCMS cross industry collaboration can speed the development and commercialization of innovative technology.

The Electrical Wire Integrity System (EWIS) project has resulted in a contract potentially worth over $60 million dollars to NCMS member Eclypse International Corporation of Corona and  saved the United States Air Force over $269,000 in the first six months of deployment.  This success resulted in EWIS being awarded a 2005 Chief of Staff Team Excellence Award, which honors outstanding team performance to promote systematic process improvement and helps publicize best practices throughout the Air Force.

In 2006 EWIS was recognized with a Defense Manufacturing Excellence Award for outstanding cooperative efforts on technology development between government, industry and academia.

Watch:

A new video has been created to explain the benefits of this project. 

For more information please contact:

Senior Program Manager Mike Gnam at (734) 995-4971, mikeg@ncms.org