Photo By Staff Sgt. Chad Nelson | Sgt. 1st Class Joseph Leblanc, III, future ops non-commissioned officer in charge, G3...... read more read more
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When most people submit their Air Movement Requests to move from base to base, they just e-mail it and patiently wait for a response. Very seldom does anyone think of the journey the requests take.
In the past, this process was a lengthy ordeal. A clerk would open AMR e-mails and conduct a quality control to see if a flight was possible. If a flight was possible, the clerk logged the AMR, assigned a tracking number, archived the AMR into a shared drive folder, printed the AMR and sent a confirmation e-mail to the requestor.
All of this took more than nine minutes per AMR. Then quality control stepped in and created the lift tracker, which is the flight schedule for missions. With upwards of 140 air movement requests submitted every day, the time-consuming process was performed 24 hours per day.
This was a problem for the incoming G3 Air with 3rd Infantry Division, who had fewer Soldiers in the section than its predecessors.
"[The op tempo] required four more people than we have," said Maj. Dana L. Smith, deputy G3 Air, 3rd Infantry Division.
Maj. Smith, a firm believer in "work smarter, not harder," found that he had just the idea that would reduce the personnel requirements and save large amounts of time — an automated system that would compile the data, which was previously compiled by the AMR clerk.
By using the visual basic interface in Microsoft Excel, Smith was able to program everything needed to submit AMRs and compile the lift tracker. By creating countless conditional statements in the program, such as having the program not search for flights on days other than the requested date, the program was slowly developed to what is being used today.
Vast amounts of information had to be input into the program for it to run. Approximate flight times, how much time a helicopter can be in the air before needing to refuel, how many people and how much equipment a helicopter can hold and many more facts were researched and programmed.
The program took approximately three months from concept to implementation.
Now the G3 Air is able to run at 40 percent strength and with one-third the staff as compared to their predecessors due to the program, according to Smith.
The three months used to create this program has saved hundreds of man hours since the G3 Air deployed to Iraq in October. With the automated system, full missions can be built in three hours, with individual flights being built in seconds. The old system could take up to 10 hours, as missions were created by printing out AMRs, laying them out, taking notes and creating each flight mission by hand, said Sgt. 1st Class Joseph Leblanc, III, future ops non-commissioned officer in charge, G3 Air, 3rd ID
"Everything was on this table," said Sgt. 1st Class Leblanc, pointing to a massive, eight-foot-long table.
"Everything to my left was the north [of Iraq]; everything to my right was the south. It was a stack of papers. If I had Speicher to Kirkuk, that was one stack," said Leblanc. With an average of 60 flight legs per day, the stacks were substantial. Proud of the hard work he was doing with the old, manual process, it took Leblanc some time to get used to the reduced work load involved with the automated process.
The table, now empty, sits in a corner.
Leblanc took great pride in the hard work he committed to the old process, and embracing the automated process has taken time.
"I didn't like it at first. Once you learn something and you think you're good at something, change isn't always embraced. But, this system makes my job so much easier," said Leblanc.
The automatic process, while faster, also ensures no mistakes are made in the process.
"Everything is going to match up," said the sergeant first class. "There are less complaints, a lot less complaints."
| Date Taken: | 03.30.2010 |
| Date Posted: | 03.30.2010 07:41 |
| Story ID: | 47428 |
| Location: | CONTINGENCY OPERATING BASE SPEICHER, IQ |
| Web Views: | 380 |
| Downloads: | 308 |
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