Intransit management: it's time has come: if you've ever wondered why the system is doing dumb things such as trying to ship an asset from your base that you need, then you'll agree the time has come for the Air Force to do a better job in managing its intransit assets.

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The need for improving the management of the requisition and intransit (both retrograde from a base to the depot, and the depot shipping to the base) processes is becoming more important as the Air Force implements Repair Network Transformation (RNT) (formerly Repair Enterprise for the 21st Century). As part of RNT, the Air Force is increasing the amount of reparable spare parts in the intransit pipeline from 487K to 980K units a year. At any one time, the average amount of reparable spares in the pipeline will increase from $232M to $438M. (1) Today's intransit system data is so inaccurate that the Air Force repair prioritization system does not use the data to determine what to repair. After all, if the system shows an asset intransit, the base will not need another asset, especially if the base already received the asset and the repair system still shows it as intransit. The current Air Force repair and distribution prioritization system might not only forgo repair of an asset for that base, it may redistribute the asset from that base, since the data in the system indicates the base has more assets than it needs (one on-hand and one due-in).

What We Found

Requisitioning. In our analyses (2) of requisition data, we found over 28K requisitions loaded in SBSS accounts that did not have a matching requisition in the wholesale systems (24K at DLA and 4K at AFMC). Either the requisition was never received at the depot, the depot rejected the requisition and the base never received the rejection, or the depot shipped the asset and the base never received it. On the other hand, we found 30K requisitions at the depot (28K at DLA and 2K at AFMC), for which the bases no longer had any record and no longer had a need.

Retrograde. There were four major findings.

First, the Air Force is retrograding reparable parts from bases to the depot repair facility that do not need to use premium transportation. A total of 34 percent of the items being retrograded used premium transportation only to sit at the depot repair line because there were plenty of carcasses already in the queue for repair. The Air Force could reduce its (second destination) transportation cost by $2.4M per year by using routine transportation for items with a backlog of carcasses for repair.

Second, the retrograde times being reported to the Air Force Secondary Item Requirements System (D200A) are not accurate. There were stock numbers (for example, 5841001233011) that had 615 retrograde occurrences with a median time of 7 days, and an average time of 9 days, where the requirements computation was using 2 days. In this case, the computation was significantly underestimating the pipeline time and the resulting computed requirement was insufficient to meet the targeted aircraft availability.