WebFOCUS Gives United States Air Force a Real-Time View of Air Mobility Operations

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	SNAPSHOT Organization: United States Air Force Air Mobility Command, Logistics Plan Division (contractors supporting the U.S. Air Force command and control system). Challenge: Enable U.S. Air Force Command and Control centers to determine the status of aircraft all over the world in real time. Strategy: Leverage investment in existing transaction systems by creating a data warehouse and providing Web-based access to reports providing logistics information. Results: Highly efficient system that provides a centralized, real-time view of the status of planes, improving planning and decision-making while reducing costs. Information Builders Solution: WebFOCUS, iWay Enterprise Integration Suite, Consulting.

Highly Efficient New System Cuts Costs, Improves Planning and Decision-Making

Outside the pages of comic books, the fate of the free world rarely falls into the hands of a single individual. A superhero might have the ability to single-handedly save the world before lunchtime, but in the real world, it’s generally a group effort – and it’s done on a budget.

For example, hundreds of command and control personnel are charged with tracking and monitoring the activities of the United States Air Force’s Air Mobility Command (AMC), a fleet of 1,800 aircraft that flies tanker and cargo missions for the United States Air Force. AMC supports U.S. Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) – an organization of the Department of Defense charged with overseeing and managing all of the mobility forces within the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines.

“Every war fighter knows that AMC is who you call when you want to bring the forces to the fight, sustain them while they’re there, and bring everyone home when it’s over,” says General John Handy, Commander in Chief of USTRANSCOM.

From moving tanks and troops to transporting water and whales, AMC has been called upon to support major contingencies and humanitarian operations around the world. Within the United States, the command has provided much-needed aid to disaster victims from New York to California. “We’ve provided relief supplies to hurricane, flood, and earthquake victims both at home and abroad and have flown food and medicine to the innocent civilian victims of the relentless repression of the Taliban regime,” adds Handy.

Today, Information Builders is making AMC’s job a little easier by combining transactions from several different information systems into an operational data store that offers a near real-time view of the entire AMC fleet – easily accessible from a standard Web browser.

“Information Builders’ WebFOCUS and iWay Software allow us to fuse data from multiple systems and develop a composite picture of our operation,” says Joseph Sabin, a systems analyst for AMC’s Logistics Plan Division. “Our overall objective is to give our command and control personnel a global picture so they can determine what the status is for each and every asset that leaves an airfield. We want everyone working from the same information – a single snapshot that portrays the information they need to make deployment decisions.”

Improving Real-Time Information Delivery

Building this composite view of the diverse AMC fleet is no small task. Each AMC aircraft can have as many as 30 or 40 different configurations depending on what the mission requires, such as to drop paratroopers, drop cargo, or perform extractions. Maintenance and support forces are stationed throughout the world to support these aircraft, many of them at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois. But because planes often fly numerous missions in sequence – changing configurations for different tasks – and don’t return to their U.S. base for weeks, it is difficult for the command and control centers to know the status of each plane at any moment in time.

Until recently, command and control personnel queried an online transaction processing (OLTP) system to obtain this information. The system, mainly used by maintenance and supply technicians, was not an ideal way to support combat forces during an air deployment. “The command and control centers control the planning and execution of our missions,” explains Sabin. “In the past, these users were required to know all the processes and procedures of our transactional systems. We decided it made better sense to extract the relevant data and put it into a data warehouse designed just for command and control personnel.”

Getting Airborne With WebFOCUS

In November 2000, Sabin and his team were asked to devise a new reporting system that would enable Air Force personnel to better monitor AMC forces throughout the world. AMC had already purchased Information Builders software to connect its transactional system to its command and control system, replacing a homegrown reporting tool in the process. “We were using it to extract transactional data into a separate reporting database and create queries on the fly,” Sabin says.

Sabin determined that his team could leverage the technology assets they already had in place to meet the new reporting requirements. Initially, AMC used Java™ and Perl scripts to create Web-based query screens, allowing authorized users to see the status of the entire fleet with a few commands. “With Information Builders’ WebFOCUS, we realized that we could develop screens without using Pearl script, and create a more user-friendly system at the same time,” Sabin adds. “The idea is to enter data once and use it in multiple locations, providing universal access from any browser.”

Information Builders Consulting assisted with this aspect of the architecture, deploying the Enterprise Integration Suite from iWay Software to automate the extraction, transfer and load (ETL) process. “iWay not only has the necessary ETL tools, it also has tools that allow you to more closely integrate disparate applications,” says Sabin. “Instead of having the command and control system process the data that it needs, we will use iWay to set up an interface from our maintenance system into our command and control system. This will help us to achieve a near real-time view of information since we will always be looking at current transactions.”

Staging a Reconnaissance Mission

As AMC defined its data warehouse architecture, Sabin examined the results achieved by other Information Builders customers with an eye toward duplicating their best practices. “We didn’t reinvent the wheel,” Sabin says. “We looked at how market-leading organizations such as a major shipping company were using WebFOCUS technology and then attempted to mirror their business processes.”

For example, the shipping company leverages current information from its transaction processing systems to create a data warehouse of package-tracking data. This is similar to what AMC set out to achieve – except that the “packages” might be filled with paratroopers. “This solution appealed to us because they are not creating any new data,” explains Sabin. “They are taking the data they already have and maximizing the way it is used. Similarly, our transactional systems for maintenance, supply and acquisition yield information such as aircraft status, availability, location, open discrepancies, assets within supply bins, and assets that are waiting for supply. We can pull that data once, then use it in many places.”

AMC is in the process of converting 15 data entry screens to WebFOCUS, working from templates that came with the WebFOCUS product. “WebFOCUS is very flexible and easy to use,” continues Sabin. “It has an efficient architecture for data transfer and reporting. WebFOCUS relies on iWay to update the data warehouse by merely copying the changes to the database, rather than refreshing the entire database. This frees up network bandwidth and streamlines the transactional process.”

Maximizing Existing Resources

Today, AMC always has accurate, current data to make decisions, which leads to better planning and reduced costs – a critical factor given the increased scrutiny of government spending. “Working economically means maximizing the use of our existing systems, which was one of our directives from the outset,” he says.

All Department of Defense technology initiatives are subjected to a cost-benefit analysis, and their proponents must be able to demonstrate a return on investment before the first dollar is spent. Where possible, all new systems must be integrated with existing systems and comply with the overall framework that the Department of Defense has established. “Information Builders products allow us to integrate data from many disparate sources without redoing the whole system and starting from scratch,” says Sabin. “What we are doing today is sustainable in the future, despite changes in the infrastructure.”

Mission Accomplished

Using WebFOCUS, Sabin and his team created a browser-driven reporting system that enables AMC personnel to support the planning and execution of day-to-day missions throughout the world. About 25,000 Air Force personnel currently use the system. Sabin says that number will grow to 80,000 in the next couple of years. “WebFOCUS technology allows us to leverage data and transaction systems we have in place,” he says. “It can talk to virtually any data in any format and pull it all together to give us the big picture.”

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. Far from being a comic-book fantasy, these military personnel are leveraging real-time information to accomplish their mission to make the world a safer place for everyone.

“Anyone with the proper authority can use WebFOCUS to see the same status information at the same time, from anywhere in the world,” Sabin concludes. “We succeeded in building a functional data warehouse that allows us to get near real-time logistics information and command and control information into the hands of our people – without requiring them to have an understanding of how the transactional system works.”

David Baum is a freelance business and technology writer residing in Santa Barbara, Calif.

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