United States Air Force Streamlines Air Mobility Command Operations With WebFOCUS and iWay

From moving tanks to transporting whales, the United States Air Mobility Command (AMC) is continually called upon to support military contingencies and humanitarian operations around the world. Using a fleet of 1,500 tanker and airlift aircraft, AMC supports U.S. Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) – an organization within the Department of Defense charged with managing the transportation and distribution of personnel, equipment, and supplies within the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and other government agencies.

In addition to supporting major military operations, AMC provides supplies to hurricane, flood, and earthquake victims and has flown food and medicine to the civilian victims of natural disasters and military operations. It's a huge job that occupies thousands of personnel charged with planning, monitoring, and executing mobility missions. Working with AMC and the Defense Information System Agency (DISA), Information Builders is making this job a little easier by enabling mission dispatchers at the AMC Tanker and Airlift Control Center to more easily plan, track, and execute AMC's ongoing global tanker and airlift missions.

"Our objective is to supply a global picture of mobility resources so we can always determine the status of each and every asset, worldwide," explains Joseph Sabin, systems analyst for AMC's Logistics Integration Division. "We want to make sure everyone has the same information at all times – a single, accurate snapshot that portrays the information we need to make better decisions. AMC Command and Control personnel must ensure that the right people, equipment, and supplies are delivered to the right place at the right time, even as we maximize our financial resources and get the most from every dollar."

Delivering Current Information

Developing a common view of Mobility Air Force (MAF) operations and logistics resources is an ongoing challenge. Each plane can have as many as 40 configurations depending on what the mission requires, such as to drop paratroopers, transport cargo, or perform extractions. Specific configurations such as an aircraft's location, onboard supplies, and availability continually change as each plane begins each new mission – and many AMC aircraft run numerous missions in sequence.

In the past, AMC used Perl scripts and Java™ tools to create customized reports. Command and Control personnel used these reports to obtain mission control information from several different online transaction processing (OLTP) systems. According to Sabin, these reports took six to eight weeks to create and were difficult to modify and sustain.

"Accessing the production OLTP systems used by operations, maintenance, and supply technicians was not an ideal way to gain composite views of MAF resources," Sabin admits. "In most instances, these systems provided limited functional information rather than an integrated view of AMC activities."

Gathering Advice From the Front Lines

As AMC defined its business intelligence and database architecture, they examined award-winning systems from other Information Builders' customers, with an eye toward utilizing the best practices of each within the AMC's new systems. They were particularly interested in the systems created by commercial carriers such as a major shipping company as well as those from DoD Agencies like the U.S. Navy. They wanted to establish a BI system that upheld the mandates of the USTRANSCOM Joint Distribution Architecture (JDA) and the Global Combat Support System Integration Framework, which meant they had to leverage legacy systems rather than create new transactional systems from scratch. "The shipping company solution appealed to us because the shipping company was not creating any new data," Sabin explains. "Instead, they took the legacy OLTP data they already had and maximized the way it was being used by fusing it with data from multiple disparate systems to provide a common operating picture."

AMC had all the information on hand; it was just a question of structuring it correctly for easy access and display. "Our transactional systems for maintenance, supply, transporta-tion, planning, support equipment, and vehicles all yield pertinent information, such as aircraft and equipment status, availability, location, open discrepancies, assets within supply bins, and assets that are waiting for supply parts," Sabin adds. "We realized we could pull that data into an operational data store (ODS) as often as required, and then use it in multiple reports to satisfy management's decision-making requirements."

Launching Strategic Initiatives

AMC's Mikel Brantley, David Kenyon, and Perry Elder, and DISA's Kelly Snodgrass, Paul Cousins, David Coleson, Robert Walker, Seyed Golshani, and Lance Dudek all contributed to the development effort. Their expertise allowed AMC not only to meet the MAF requirements for data access and reporting, but also to provide direct update capabilities to the legacy systems.

Working with Information Builders' Consulting, the AMC team integrated data from many disparate sources without modifying or replacing the OLTP systems. They used iWay Software's Enterprise Integration Suite to pull data from 10 transactional systems into an Oracle-based ODS, which houses all the information that's relevant to Command and Control personnel. Then they used WebFOCUS to generate reports from the ODS that are accessible to authorized users via standard Web browsers.

AMC used WebFOCUS Management Reporting Environment (MRE), WebFOCUS Performance Management Framework, and WebFOCUS ReportCaster to redesign mainframe COBOL reports, monitor performance metrics, and distribute reports to authorized users. These same Oracle and XML data files can also be used under a "publish and subscribe" model to provide data to other information systems.

AMC also utilized the output from iWay's ETL tools to replace complicated FTP and load processes. "Instead of having the Command and Control system process the data that it needs, we used iWay to set up an interface from our maintenance system into our Command and Control system," Sabin explains. "This helped us to achieve a near-real-time view of the operation, since we are always looking at current transactions."

Thanks to iWay's broad data-access and Web services capabilities, AMC can extract data from just about any existing system and combine it with other data to provide a common operating picture of available resources and assets. Sabin says it only takes a few days to create new reports, and existing reports can be modified or updated very quickly. "The idea is to enter data once and use it in multiple locations, providing universal access from any browser," he claims. "WebFOCUS lets us develop screens without using Perl script – and create a more user-friendly system at the same time."

Mission Accomplished

Today, the Web-based business intelligence system supplies operations planners and maintenance personnel with a near-real-time view of the availability, status, and specific capabilities of the entire MAF operation. "This new architecture is quicker, cheaper, and less CPU-intensive, and it improves data integrity," Sabin sums up. "It delivers near-real-time information to logistics and Command and Control personnel without requiring these users to understand how the transactional systems work – let alone query multiple stovepipe systems, like they had to do in the past."

Forty thousand to fifty thousand personnel currently use the reporting capabilities of this BI system to manage between 400 to 500 missions per day. Users include component commanders, planners, decision-making personnel, and base-level production managers at 72 Mobility Air Force home stations and more than 200 transient stations worldwide. A Command and Control officer in Australia or Germany, for example, no longer needs to pick up the telephone to determine the status of an aircraft in South Africa. It's all available with a few clicks of the mouse.

"AMC always has accurate and current data online to make decisions," says Sabin. "This leads to better mission planning, tracking, and execution even as it reduces operating costs. We're providing visibility into all mobility assets and enhancing our ability to provide accurate and timely information to pertinent users."

According to Sabin, these are critical benefits, especially given the escalating demands placed on AMC aircraft to support humanitarian, contingency, and combat operations in direct support of DoD global mobility missions. "Our critical information is more available, current, and accurate," he concludes. "Not only that, but it requires less effort to obtain the information, which ultimately reduces costs to taxpayers."