An enhanced data analytics tool is helping Navy keep its aircraft in the air with greater consistency, giving analysts insight into key readiness data.
Released in July 2016 as an upgrade to the Integrated Logistics Support Management System, or ILSMS, the tool, known as Vector, ties together some 20 formerly disparate databases. It aims to bring a predictive capacity to aviation readiness, giving planners a view into potential problems before they arise.
"I can drill down and very quickly say, 'There's your problem right there!' whereas before I had to take one spreadsheet and match it to another spreadsheet, and meld them together. That could take up to half a day depending on how big the problem actually was," said Greg Ashley, a Readiness Logistics Analyst on the V-22 Program at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland.
Aviation readiness has been an issue for Navy in recent years. The ability to fly when and as needed "is in a precarious position," a panel of officers told the House Armed Services Committee last year.
Addressing the same committee in July 2016, Rear Admiral Michael C. Manazir, deputy chief of naval operations for warfare systems, said a decade of high-tempo work had overstressed the systems needed to keep aircraft in flying shape. At the same time, the Navy has been "challenged to recover full productivity after hiring freezes, furloughs, and previous restrictions on overtime," he said.
The net result is that planes spend too long on the ground. The answer from the Naval Air System Command, or NAVAIR, Aviation Logistics and Maintenance Analysis Division: better data management.
Previously, vital information on aircraft status, parts and workflow has been siloed and often inaccessible.
"An analyst would go into a database, pull the data, clean it up, and then the data would lead them to something else where they would have to go to another database and do the same thing over and over," said Aubrey Dennis, Naval Air Systems Command logistics and industrial operations national industrial operations director.
ILSMS aimed to smooth things out. "The point was to do some analytics to find out what the root causes were, what the correlations where that might be causing the airplanes to be down," Dennis said. "But ILSMS was being used in a very limited way, and we saw bigger possibilities in it."
To build a smoother data analytics mechanism, developers had to overcome territorial hurdles, connected databases from various sources outside NAVAIR including the Defense Logistics Agency, the Naval Supply Center in Philadelphia, and diverse cost accounting centers.
"We as NAVAIR didn’t own all those databases and very often the owners of those other databases don’t want people mucking around in their data. They have firewalls and things like that they didn’t want us to penetrate," Dennis said. "So we had to do a lot of work just to get access to these databases, to demonstrate that we weren’t going to break it."
Vector now cuts across multiple databases to give a more comprehensive view than was previously available.
"The tool pulls together all the data from all those sources and presents it in a manner that can be easily reviewed. Instead of looking at an Excel spreadsheet you get a graph: Here’s how many airplanes are down. Here are the top 10 components they are down for," Dennis said.
Users can drill down into the data to correlate present shortages against historical trends. "In the total population of F-18s, how many were down for this reason? The tools will tell you what components in those systems were holding those airplanes down. It will tell you what the parts and the subcomponents and the status," Dennis said.
This in turn gives planners an opportunity to become proactive. Deeper analytics make it possible to watch the entire inventory of aircraft for places where problems are likely to arise and to take preemptive active.
"Vector starts to move us into proactive, projected space. It will set a baseline for a system, component or subcomponent using the latest five years worth of data on failures across those systems: Here’s how often it fails. If you move away from that baseline it will give you a heat map, a yellow light that shows you are failing more often than expected," Dennis said.
"The more often the system fails, the more warnings you will get. If we are proactive as soon as we see those initial warnings, we can take action before the supply system runs out of parts and before the maintenance system gets backlogged," he said. "We can get ahead of the problem."
