SUSTAINING DATA DELIVERY ON THE FUTURE ARMY NETWORK
in the fourth quarter of FY17, it took an average 162 days to repair a Satellite Transportable Terminal at Tobyhanna Army Depot, CECOM’s organic indus- trial facility in Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania. By the second quarter of FY19, that was down to 40 days.
Tobyhanna Army Depot has driven this improvement with workflow reforms and data-driven decision-making. In fact, its Performance to Promise, a broad, cross- metric measure of depot performance, rose from 49 percent in FY15 to 93 percent in FY19. Tis also enabled the depot to increase its capacity for major system repairs, which rose from 184 in FY17 to 300 in FY19.
BRINGING DEPOT MAINTENANCE FORWARD Another pillar of the CECOM sustain- ment strategy is to move depot-level maintenance and repair capabilities closer to where units are stationed. So in FY18, CECOM stood up Tobyhanna depot forward locations in Korea and Europe. Meanwhile, three depot forward locations in the continental U.S. are coming online this fiscal year.
By providing more immediate access to repair expertise and services, these facili- ties can help extend C5ISR system life by an average of five to seven years.
CLOSER TO THE USER
Tobyhanna Army Depot’s forward repair facility at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, brings depot-level repair and overhaul capabilities closer to Army units. Plans call for three forward repair depots to open in the United States this fiscal year. (U.S. Army photo)
SUPPORTING SOFTWARE Of course, tactical network hardware cannot operate without underlying soft- ware, sustainment of which is a core part of CECOM’s mission. Accord- ingly, CECOM’s Software Engineering Center has heightened its focus on elec- tronic patching, or e-patching, mission command systems that have moved into sustainment. E-patching plugs vulnera- bilities in a fast and secure environment, as opposed to manual delivery and instal- lation via CD. Tis supports the tactical network objectives of increasing network resiliency and reliability by 2028.
Depending on bandwidth requirements and network availability, e-patching is not always viable for certain systems or for units deep in the field. But as much as possible, CECOM is increasingly making it the norm. From e-patching just eight of the 33 systems that were capable of being e-patched in FY17, we anticipate e-patching 24 systems by FY20.
TRANSFORMING CONTRACTING Transforming contracting is a cornerstone of CECOM’s reform platform. Specifically, CECOM has focused on consolidating software contracts for common functions to find efficiency and save money. We are consolidating 43 such contracts to 34 by the end of this fiscal year.
We are also bringing together sustainment support for enterprise resource planning programs—business management plat- forms that track and manage financial, inventory and manufacturing data— under a unified contract to be awarded in December 2019. And we are bridging hardware and software sustainment under a major unified field support contract to be awarded by the fourth quarter of FY20.
TAKING OUT ‘INSURANCE’ A brand new concept, data escrow, is another exciting contracting initiative. Under certain circumstances, CECOM may need to secure technical data and intellectual property from manufactur- ers. However, this could be enormously expensive.
To address the expense, CECOM is exper- imenting with technical data escrow accounts, set up at the time contracts are signed. Tese storage accounts give third parties oversight and control of data in a virtual lockbox. Tey act as insurance policies in case of company bankruptcy, system failure, individual hardware parts becoming unavailable, or other unex- pected events. In such cases, CECOM could negotiate to access technical data at a far lower price than it would cost to buy it outright. We have implemented an escrow account in one software contract
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Army AL&T Magazine
Summer 2019
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