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News | April 27, 2022

Data pull project introduces standardization to Cherry Point sustainment team

By Natalie Skelton, DLA Aviation Public Affairs

One of the best ways to measure the success of any project is to analyze the data generated by that project. Defense Logistics Agency Aviation at Cherry Point, North Carolina, sustainment support specialists within the Planning and Support Division are dedicated to delivering supportability analysis, ensuring warfighter support success and a continuous process improvement project focused on improving data pulls has provided them with a better tool for doing just that.

Sustainment specialists at Cherry Point completed a CPI project that has helped reduce data retrieval time by 95% and introduced a standardized data retrieval and organization process.

“Process standardization is critical,” said Kevin Jones, a Planning and Support Division sustainment support specialist. “To effectively process the sustainment workflow and make the best decisions for our customers, we need a lot of information, and it needs to be as up-to-date as possible.”

Jones said because the sustainment field is a hybrid of demand and material planning, the team requires data that both fields use. Prior to standardizing the process, sustainment support specialists spent an average of four hours each month per cycle pulling data. The process improvement has reduced that time to just 12 minutes per cycle.

While other projects were considered, Jones said the CPI team came to an agreement to standardize the monthly sustainment data-pull process “because there were several issues sustainment specialists had in common such as having to pull data from multiple platforms. The results would have the greatest positive impact for DLA Aviation at Cherry Point and the level of support we were providing for our customers at Fleet Readiness Center East.”

Standardization is critical because of the sheer amount of information required to effectively process the sustainment workflow.

Jones said without a platform dedicated solely to sustainment, team members had to work from several web-based information systems, some of which required multiple queries to complete a report.

“Another positive outcome of this discussion [CPI event] was the opportunity to learn more about our partners’ planning processes,” Jones said.

Implementation of the monthly sustainment data-pull process at other industrial support activities is a future initiative to expand the capability beyond DLA Aviation at Cherry Point.