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Strategic Supplier Summit stresses Air Force, industry partnerships

  • Published
  • By Mike W. Ray
  • Tinker Public Affairs
TINKER AIR FORCE BASE, Okla. --  The Strategic Suppliers Summit held recently at Tinker Air Force Base focused on "how to become better at collaborative planning," said Col. Tim Henke, commander of the 448th Supply Chain Management Wing and host of the conference.

"Relationships bridge the misunderstandings" between the military and its suppliers, the colonel said. "We have different constituencies and view things from different perspectives. We see the same regulations, but sometimes we interpret them in different ways."

A collaborative forecasting framework being developed at Tinker will enable parts suppliers to "better integrate our workload into their production schedules," Colonel Henke said.

"Our industry partners have so much commercial workload that their Defense Department workload constitutes only a relatively small percentage now," he continued. Consequently, "We have to give them much better forecasts."

More accurate forecasting "allows them to be more efficient, and enables us to get a faster return on our items. Instead of waiting two years for parts, we can get them in six months, for example."

It is critical that the Air Force share its requirements with its suppliers "far enough ahead of time" so they can "make good decisions about setting aside capacity on their repair lines, hiring workers, getting materials for those parts," Colonel Henke said.

As an illustration, he said titanium is extremely hard to get on the world market. "So, if we don't forecast and predict far enough ahead of time, our suppliers run into delays in going out and finding this material, and then they have to mill it, manufacture it, turn it into new parts. That can be literally a three-year process from start to finish."

Suppliers are interested in developing more partnerships with Air Force maintenance complexes, Colonel Henke said.

"There's a lot of interest for us to do performance-based logistics contracts," the colonel said. "In a partnership, the commercial suppliers help provide better parts support and engineering expertise, and work with our depot maintenance partners to bring in more workload."

"We get a lot of parts from suppliers that we bring into the depot and provide to the repair lines so they can manufacture higher assemblies or perform programmed depot maintenance on aircraft," Colonel Henke said.

Obsolete parts -- for aircraft such as the B-52, the KC-135 and the F-15, as well as other weapon systems -- present the greatest vulnerability because they are not available from recognized, authorized sources, a Commerce Department report says.

Among those attending the Feb. 5-6 summit were Col. Raymone Mijares, commander of the 848th Supply Chain Management Group at Tinker; Col. Rex Adee, commander, Defense Logistics Agency, Aviation, Oklahoma City; and representatives of the Defense Logistics Agency, Defense Contract Management Agency and the Defense Contract Audit Agency. Participating remotely were the 638th Supply Chain Management Group at Robins AFB, Ga., the 748th Supply Chain Management Group at Hill AFB, Utah, and personnel at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio.

Industries with representatives in attendance at the summit included IBM, Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, GE Aviation Systems, Honeywell, GE Military Systems, ITT Exelis, Northrop Grumman, BAE, and United Technologies Aerospace Systems, which includes Pratt & Whitney, Goodrich, and Hamilton-Sundstrand. They all work closely with the U.S. Air Force to build or repair military spares.