Improvement project team earns flight on KC-135 Published Dec. 17, 2010 By Marti D. Ribeiro 76th Maintenance Wing Transformation TINKER AIR FORCE BASE, Okla. -- "It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience that I will remember forever," said Homer Whitt, process analyst with the 76th Aircraft Maintenance Group and recent recipient of an incentive ride last month on a KC-135 Stratotanker here. This lifetime memory was part of a reward given to Mr. Whitt, along with his process improvement team, for the award-winning project they completed last year. This reward was part of the 76th Aircraft Maintenance Group Annual Award program. Joyce Grissom and Justin Lewis, Tinker civilians, and Joseph Dixon, a defense contractor with ICF International, joined forces with Mr. Whitt last year to develop a solution to a software problem that has plagued the Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center for years. The 76th Aircraft Maintenance Group uses two IT systems to track and report on aircraft inspection requirements. The two systems did not interface with each other and forced Tinker employees to manually pull data from one system and manually input it into another. The process was extremely time consuming and required 16 man hours per week on average. In addition the time lag in reporting resulted in numerous duplicate inspections to occur. "Originally, we wanted to get access to the systems themselves and re-program them to talk to each other," Mr. Whitt said. "But, gaining access to the inter-workings of the systems was going to take more than a year and we didn't want to wait that long." The next step was to ask the experts if there was a data-mining software that would touch the two systems and gather data to be used here at Tinker. "The answer was a user-friendly program designed in Microsoft Access that touched both databases without changing anything within the systems," Mr. Lewis said. According to the team, the new program can pull data from the system, run queries, sort, produce graphs and schedule inspections using drop-down menus. "It does in minutes, what used to take someone two full days," Mr. Whitt said. He went on to explain that the previous system had a week-long lag in data, but in the new system, the user can pull data in real time. A year later, the program is still in place and is used daily by Tinker employees. The team's hard work resulted in being recognized as the 2009 annual award winners for Category 7. This year the 76th AMXG rewarded their annual winners with a KC-135 flight last month in which they were able to rotate through the cockpit and the boom during the flight and witness emergency in-flight training by a Tinker medical team. "This is a great incentive for people at Tinker, especially those who work on the aircraft for 30 years and never get to fly in it," Mr. Lewis said. "I will always remember this."