U.S. Air Force Logistics Honored with Prestigious General Spencer Award for Innovation
One Network and NCMS Accelerate U.S. Air Force Logistics and Acquisitions
The Logistics Information Technology Innovation Team was recently presented with the prestigious Gen. Larry O. Spencer Innovation Award, an annual award intended to recognize an individual or team whose actions demonstrate innovation in cost and manpower savings to improve efficiency, operational readiness, and replication of the innovation across the Air Force enterprise.
Lieutenant Colonel Bradley Fisher was honored with the third annual General Spencer Award in September of 2017 because of his team’s ability to successfully inject agility, rapid time to value, and dramatic cost savings into some of the Air Force’s critical business processes. The Logistics Information Technology Innovation Team’s results were supported through a partnership with One Network (ONE), a global provider of a multi-party digital network platform and services, under NCMS’ Commercial Technologies for Maintenance Activities (CTMA) program. The NCMS charter and business model is tailor-made to help the Air Force evaluate innovative technologies that can provide transformational change more efficiently, with less risk, and at a lower cost.
One Network’s technology and value methodology enables the U.S. Air Force to leverage capabilities from the commercial market and enhance them for use throughout the Department of Defense (DoD). One Network helped the Air Force demonstrate quick results by leveraging and adapting the Company’s Real Time Value NetworkTM (RTVN) technology and modules that were configured and built for the U.S. Marine Corps. A tenet of One Network’s RTVN platform is to build on the shoulders of those that have invested their time and energies, and provide those capabilities to the broader defense community, greatly reducing the DoD’s investment while reducing time to production.
This pilot demonstrates that ONE’s technology can support any class of supply. While the U.S. Marine Corps solution focuses on Class V(w) Munitions, the Air Force was able to leverage the same platform to support their innovative Item Master project, intended to support all supply classes across their Logistics backbone.
Through DoD Instructions 5000.75, the DoD is pushing to move towards more proof of concepts – more incremental capabilities and improvement of the acquisition process to get better results more quickly. This partnership is a demonstration of that effort according to Air Force Logistics leadership, who commented, “ONE is the catalyst that allows the U.S Air Force to see the art of the possible. Fast demonstrations and proof of concepts quickly demonstrate what will work and move projects into production. Working with ONE, we have a new secret weapon.” For example, the Air Force delivered a prototype in only 16 weeks, which is 80 percent faster, with a cost reduction of 10 percent over traditional legacy costs.
It’s not just about the technology when working with commercial partners. One Network’s implementation methodology also supports rapid time to value. The U.S. Air Force believes they can reduce Ammunitions touch time by 50 percent while driving worldwide visibility. One Network also helps the Air Force meet mandates such as Financial Improvement and Audit Readiness (FIAR) compliance which helps meet Congressional Audit mandates while driving more efficiencies into day-to-day operations and improving mission readiness.
This CTMA project truly embraces private sector and government organizations working together. Government project participants include the U.S. Air Force Logistics, Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), the U.S. Navy, and the Marine Corps PM Ammo. By observing the project collectively, the teams can learn and incorporate agility and innovation into their own projects while receiving direct benefit from the results of this project.
One Network CEO and founder, Greg Brady, commented, “We are proud to partner with the U.S. Air Force and NCMS. Together, we can better serve the men and women fighting on front lines while simultaneously being better stewards of taxpayer dollars.”