Business operations.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

It was another great year for the business operations division. For starters, our ongoing effort to outsource information technology support finally paid off. After months of maintaining our computer and network resources using out-of-hide manning, we finally awarded a service contract and forged a partnership with a local firm to take over functional support for the Air Force Logistics Studies Workshop and the administrative tasks that come with maintaining client support, security, and user training. The transition was virtually seamless. We made information technology process and infrastructure improvements right off the bat, and created a tech-refresh schedule for our future client and server requirements. We also injected resilience into our systems by bolstering data backup processes and uninterrupted power supply systems. Maintaining the Air Force Logistics Studies Workshop infrastructure and supply data is critical to providing the information necessary to support the studies and research we tackle here at the Agency as well as our external customers; we're now more prepared than ever to live up to that challenge. We weren't only focused on hardware and infrastructure; we also made great strides this year in improving project status reporting and tracking progress toward goals laid out in our strategic plan.

One of our Agency successes this year was the completion of an internal Air Force Smart Operations for the 21st Century (AFSO21) event in which we leaned-out our logistics study process, slashing study completion time by an average of 42 percent. Of course, changes in the study process necessitate changes in the information system used to monitor the process; our Project Information Reporting System (PIRS) is no exception. We added tools to track direct links to agile combat support in our studies. We updated the system to ...