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Recently, Air Mobility Command's Logistics, Engineering and Force Protection Directorate, A4, became the first Air Force Major Command directorate to meet Air Force Inspection System requirements for their function, while still complying with the spirit and intent of AFI 90-201, "The Air Force Inspection System."
Teaming with the AMC Inspector General, A4 developed a unique approach to provide units a thorough objective assessment which verifies and validates that the Quality Assurance office is ensuring compliance and discipline throughout the maintenance complex.
A4 provides innovative and integrated logistics, engineering, and force protection solutions for the warfighter that enable rapid global mobility and enhance operational planning. Their three primary roles are to exercise lead command responsibilities for mobility air forces, develop combat support policy as well as organize, train, and equip assigned AMC forces and conduct operational planning and support as an Air Force Forces staff.
In the spring of 2015, after an unusually high number of aircraft incidents, the A4 Director, Brig. Gen. Stacey Hawkins, made his top priority ensuring compliance and discipline across the maintenance complex.
This task was levied onto AMC's Aircraft Maintenance Division. Hawkins tasked them to create an approach which would bring back some of the proven elements of previous inspections in accordance with the new Air Force Inspection System.
"I connected the dots between the wing commander's inspection program and the maintenance group's Maintenance Standardization and Evaluation Program," said Lt. Col. Justin Radford, A4's aircraft maintenance deputy division chief. "Once those dots were connected, I then asked if our current approach was verifying and validating the MSEP program. It was not. In fact, we had lost the bubble with respect to compliance and discipline in the field."
After finding out they needed to take a different approach, Radford sat down with the experts in both the maintenance policy section, Senior Master Sgt. Joshua Mursu, and within the AMC IG. Together, they collaborated and developed an approach which met all the parties' needs.
Mursu said that the new process allows them to give high-fidelity, actionable feedback concerning the health of the inspected unit. The new process takes the old process, combining the previous system of pyramid evaluations with compliance-based inspections of items identified by the unit's continuous evaluations process, incorporated within the MSEP validation.
"We have implemented a program that validates maintenance unit MSEP in order to judge the clarity of the sight picture provided by the units (quality assurance) office," he said. "This sample strategy utilizes both performance and compliance based inspecting that targets areas previously inspected by the unit's QA."
During the process, they take a statistically valid sample size and compare the unit's own MSEP results to the results obtained by the sampling. The inspected quality assurance program is then rated according to the IG's 5-tier rating system based on the correlation of the unit's average pass rate throughout the process and the pass rate computed during the Unit Effectiveness Inspection capstone event.
Mursu said once the MSEP validation is complete, they continue to inspect areas they know the unit has not looked at for a lengthy period of time or at all, which reveals any blind spots or areas of undetected non-compliance that may exist within the unit's inspection program.
A4 has already implemented the new approach for the past two capstone events. In both cases, the inspection team received positive feedback from both maintenance group commanders, and was able to validate the effectiveness of group's inspection program.
Maj. Jason Hughes, who works for the AMC inspector general, said, "What A4 is accomplishing through their approach to AFIS has been incredible. They are executing the purpose of AFIS by enabling and strengthening commander's mission effectiveness, promoting discipline, improving unit performance, and identifying issues important to commanders at all levels from units to staffs."
Hughes said that Radford and Mursu's team have gone beyond simply highlighting trends and executing UEIs. Their game plan satisfies the need for a virtual, but thorough, inspection throughout the continuous evaluation period of the UEI cycle as well as a right size footprint during the capstone on-site visit. This gives commanders up and down the chain of command the data that they need to make the right decisions and accept risk when and where necessary.
Once A4 has a few more inspections under this new approach and has gathered more objective data that supports it, they will be socializing this concept with the other MAJCOM A4s. The goal will be to standardize across the Air Force how the A4 functionals execute their responsibilities under the new AFIS construct.
"I think the bottom line is that the collaboration between the A4 and IG developed, arguably, the most complex and comprehensive inspection that MXG's have ever received," said Radford. "By blending proven elements of legacy inspection systems with the new AFIS construct, we are now executing a vectored performance and compliance based inspection in just five days."
| Date Taken: | 03.30.2016 |
| Date Posted: | 03.30.2016 11:01 |
| Story ID: | 193869 |
| Location: | SCOTT AIR FORCE BASE, IL, US |
| Web Views: | 49 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, MAF divisions create new process for future maintenance inspections, by A1C Kiana Brothers, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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