AFIMSC helps shape installations of future

  • Published
  • By Ed Shannon
  • Air Force Installation and Mission Support Center Public Affairs
Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas --  When you walk through the building at the Air Force Installation and Mission Support Center headquarters in San Antonio, you can’t help but feel the energy.

According to Col. Marc Vandeveer, the buzz involves a new capability created behind the power of centralization of Air Force installation and mission support functions. It’s evident through the development and management of a series of tools that are changing the way the Air Force manages the I&MS enterprise.

“I’ve seen a lot of light bulbs come on with what the power of centralization brings,” said Vandeveer, the Plans and Analysis Division Chief for AFIMSC’s Expeditionary Support Directorate.

Those light bulbs include new ways to determine requirements for the installation and mission support portfolio. The Air Force centralized the management of I&MS functions when it created AFIMSC.

One of those ways is through a tool called the Installation Health Assessment, a first-of-its-kind requirements-based framework that integrates and assesses 22 I&MS mission areas, looking at performance, cost and modernization and assigning risks to the mission and force. IHA informs the planning and programming process and will be used to shape the installations of the future.

“We are having fundamentally different conversations in the hallway and with our partners across the enterprise,” Vandeveer said, “conversations that are way overdue, and it’s really exciting on where we’re moving this enterprise forward in posturing the force and our warfighter capabilities for the future. We are attempting to do this across most of the historically Mission Support Group capabilities.”

Until the Air Force centralized the I&MS budget under AFIMSC this past year, the Air Force never had been able to have those conversations. AFIMSC now can articulate I&MS requirements in the Program Objective Memorandum, including in the out-years, while balancing and leveling the risk to the Air Force across all mission areas and to Airmen and families.

“We are clearly in a transition to a requirements-based approach so that we can put the next dollar at the most important next requirement, and we’re doing this to unify the assessment across most of the Mission Support Group’s capabilities,” Vandeveer said. “It’s vital as I&MS enterprise professionals to understand what the Services Activity, Security Forces Center and Civil Engineer Center, for example, bring to the warfighter in terms of capabilities, sustainment costs, and balanced risk.”

IHA evaluates data from a variety of tools that, when combined, provide a total and complete I&MS picture in terms of performance, facilities sustainment, recapitalization, and risks to the mission and force. One tool, the Mission Dependency Index, feeds the IHA as a scoring model that describes the relative importance of an infrastructure asset or facility in terms of its mission criticality.

Russell Weniger, an engineer at AFIMSC, has worked with MDIs for 15 years and was part of the team who came across the tool. He is involved in a project expected to take two years to re-baseline the MDI to give a more accurate assessment of Air Force missions and facilities and prioritize facility projects looking at the condition of facilities and commanders’ priorities.

“We’re not changing how to prioritize projects; we’re adjusting MDI to account for local factors,” said Weniger who added the process gives local installations a voice in setting the MDI scores.

When the Air Force adopted MDIs 15 years ago, the process to implement the tool was cumbersome, Weniger said. Engineers beta-tested the process at two locations and applied the results across the Air Force uniformly.

“Engineers began to notice challenges to applying averages for a specific mission across the Air Force,” he said. “They realized having the same types of facilities with the same score as an average didn’t make sense because local factors such as the population of the local area among others were not considered.”

When the major commands managed funding for facility sustainment and recapitalization, the MDI tool provided enough data for MAJCOM commanders to make good decisions on where to spend their MAJCOM funding. However, centralization of I&MS management and the budget provides an appropriate time for AFIMSC to re-baseline the MDI, according to Weniger.

“MDIs help us focus our limited resources on the right problems,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Sustainment Management System is another asset that helps AFIMSC decision makers earmark the next available dollar on the right requirement. SMS uses data from programs such as the Air Force Common Output Level Standards, or AFCOLS.

Zak Payne, an engineer assigned to the Air Force Civil Engineer Center, one of AFIMSC’s six primary subordinate units, has worked for the past 15 months to cost out the four AFCOLS levels. Payne works with information from two inventory databases - BUILDER, which provides an inventory of facilities and their conditions, and PAVER, which reports the inventory and conditions of airfields and base pavements.

“We are just now starting to tap into the predictive model capability,” Payne said. “We can introduce scenarios in PAVER and BUILDER and aggregate sustainment data together to build portfolios by installation or by MAJCOM.”

Just as automobile manufacturers know when the parts of an automobile will need to be replaced, the BUILDER and PAVER inventories report the lifecycle of facilities and equipment, Payne said. For example, the approximate lifecycle of a building’s HVAC is a known factor. Data in BUILDER and PAVER offers a picture of when assets were installed and their replacement dates. This information is valuable in the predictive model tool as officials work with installations to plan budgets.

“The biggest takeaway from our work is what we call asset visibility,” Payne said.

According to Vandeveer, that enterprise-wide visibility comes only from the power of centralization.

“Centralization places us in the unique position to help shape the installation of the future,” he said.