CHARLESTON AIR FORCE BASE, S.C. –
Good morning, Team Charleston. I'd like to welcome to Charleston, Lt. Gen. Arthur Lichte, Assistant Vice Chief of Staff and Director, Air Force Staff, his wife, Chris, and the 40 Air Attaches and their spouses from around the world as part of your Spring Attache Tour. We're honored to show off our beautiful base and even more proud to show you how our Airmen here and abroad save lives and deliver freedom everyday.
We're never satisfied with the status quo. That's how we operate here at the home of the premier wings in Air Mobility Command and Air Force Reserve Command. The active-duty Airmen, Reservists, civil servants, and volunteers here are continuing to blaze a trail of excellence despite budget cutbacks and manpower losses.
How is that even possible? How can you take an organization that seems to be working at 100 percent capacity, take away some of its resources and expect it to maintain or sometimes even do more work than ever before? It's because Team Charleston is made up of people with a passion for what they do and our mission is too important not to complete, on time, every time.
While most are familiar with how we've developed a more efficient mission pre-launch sequence of events that keeps our C-17s in the air longer, there are ongoing projects all over base that will change the way we do business.
Take the process of moving an aircraft part from supply to the maintainer. Currently, it takes more than four hours and a nine-step process for a part to move from the warehouse to the maintainer. Our bright Airmen devised a plan that uses wireless technology, improved parts ordering software and the reorganization of the aircraft parts storage facility that reduced that four-hour wait to less than 30 minutes. Based on 50 parts ordered per shift, we can possibly create more than 200 man-hours that can be devoted to other things.
We also just had a team look at the EPR/OPR process to try and lean out wasted processes. The current process is 26 steps, takes an average of 80 days and takes about 16 reviewers to complete. They devised a new process that takes only half as many steps and a quarter of the time. This process affects every Airman on base and is just another way that we're finding simple ways to save money and time.
The professionals in the medical group also found a way to increase their output while keeping Airmen ready to deploy. At the preventative health assessments clinic, there were a high number of overdue and no-show PHAs. Every active-duty Airman was scheduled for a medical provider visit if he or she needed one or not. Now, overdue PHAs are down (from 192 to 102 in the first six weeks), just one of three Airmen is scheduled for a provided appointment and the PHAs only take an average of an hour compared to the old half-day standard.
These projects are just the start. Always look for better, faster and cheaper ways to do business. The warfighters' lives downrange depend on it.
Finally I'd like to say goodbye to Chief Master Sgt. Mel Willis and Col. Nick Desport as they move on in their careers. You both made a tremendous impact to our wing and our Air Force. I'd also like welcome Chief Master Sgt. Bernise Belcer, the wing's new command chief, and Col. Frank Jones, the new mission support group commander. I'm very confident that you'll both do great things and help our base continue leading the command in all we do.
Team Charleston -- One family, one mission, one fight!