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During last year’s Requirements Development Workshop, a team from Whiteman Air Force Base gave a presentation on a data analytics tool they developed for visualizing the installation’s facilities work task inventory. That tool sparked widespread intrigue and an idea for scaling. Flash forward to the 2025 RDW, held May 6-8, where that idea was debuted as an Air Force Civil Engineer Enterprise-wide operations management tool.
David Rarig, an industrial control systems information systems security manager with the 509th Civil Engineer Squadron, built an initial civil engineer operations dashboard for local use based on Whiteman Air Force Base’s work task data available through NexGen. It proved invaluable in enabling Whiteman to remain on top of its facilities maintenance requirements but demanded tedious manual data retrieval and entry for upkeep. To keep the dashboard current with the latest data, it required an individual to manually pull six different NexGen reports, three BUILDER reports, ingest those reports, and refresh the data flows – every single day.
After initially showcasing it during a 2024 RDW session, Rarig spent the following year working alongside the Air Force Installation and Mission Support Center’s Facilities Sustainment, Restoration, and Modernization Operations team to improve and replicate it at scale. The AFISMC FSRM Operations team saw the immense potential of expanding the scope of the tool, and sought to reduce the administrative burden of manually inputting data by introducing automation. Their pursuit has yielded the “USAF CE Operations Workbook,” which Daniel Wrob, a co-lead of the project team supporting AFIMSC in the tool’s development, briefed during this year’s RDW.
With the USAF CE Operations Workbook, all previously manual data retrieval and ingestion steps are fully automated, allowing an installation to receive a daily refresh at near-zero administrative burden. Wrob estimated that by streamlining the data refresh process, an installation will be able to save between two to four hours per day that can be reoptimized for tasks that only civil engineers can do.
Designed for flexibility and to meet individual needs, the workbook can be adapted or customized to each user’s viewing and analysis preferences, enhancing their everyday workflows. “Knowing that all bases have different missions, leadership, priorities, preferences, and need to visualize their operations data in varying ways, we knew we needed to build a flexible and customizable product,” Wrob said.
As such, the USAF CE Operations Workbook supports multi-level filtering and segmentation, allowing for comprehensive visualization of a wide range of data points and trends – all simply dependent on what a user is looking to analyze. At the installation level, it can be toggled to show work tasks by priority, Building Condition Index, Mission Dependency Index, work group, customer, facility, tracking status, month-over-month, and fiscal year-over-fiscal, among others. It even features a map view for visualizing assets across an installation geographically based on chosen data filters.
Additionally, the workbook can provide granularity on specific assets, to include the number of work tasks required, materiel cost, labor cost, corrective and preventive maintenance hours, and more, over a given period. Users can also view and track these figures at the aggregate across an installation or the entire civil engineer enterprise’s infrastructure portfolio.
Wrob underscored how the seemingly endless ways to slice and dice the data enable users to “tell the story each decision maker needs” in planning conversations around an installation’s infrastructure and facility conditions. With such extensive functionality, tracking and reporting key operations metrics will be less cumbersome, more straight-forward, and available at one’s fingertips.
The tool’s detailed insights on assets and work tasks can empower operations and maintenance personnel to make more informed, data-driven decisions. In turn, the USAF CE Operations Workbook supports greater efficiency and more calculated allocation and use of scarce resources in facility and infrastructure management to not only meet but exceed missions.
While not yet fully accessible for utilization across the civil engineer enterprise, Wrob said the AFIMSC FSRM Operations team is nearing a launch-ready product and is eager to get it in the hands of field users as early as Summer 2025.
As the USAF CE Operations Workbook approaches enterprise-wide rollout, it stands as a testament to the power of grassroots innovation, collaboration, and mission-focused problem solving. Mostly, it speaks to the power of the annual Requirements Development Workshop as a launchpad for enterprise advancement.
What began as a local solution to a data management challenge has evolved into a transformative tool poised to reshape how installations across the Air Force manage and visualize their operations. With its automation, adaptability, and analytical depth, the workbook not only streamlines daily workflows but also equips civil engineers with the insights they need to make smarter, faster, and more strategic decisions. It promises to be more than just a dashboard; it’s a catalyst for a more agile, data-driven future for the Air Force Civil Engineers.
| Date Taken: | 06.13.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 06.13.2025 15:28 |
| Story ID: | 500589 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 22 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, RDW 2025: Enabling Installation Analytics Through Enterprise Data Scale, by Turner Dilley, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
