Case In Point: Air Force Investment Review

In November 2005, the Air Force submitted a modernization request for Air Force Way II (AFWAY II) to the appropriate Investment Review Board (IRB) for approval. A member of the IRB, the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), questioned whether AFWAY II was duplicative to capabilities already provided by the DoD EMALL. The DoD EMALL allows DoD and other federal customers to find and acquire off-the-shelf, finished good items from the commercial marketplace. It provides the benefits of reduced logistics response time and improved visibility of both government and commercial sources of supply. It also facilitates the use of the Government purchase card. The IRB tasked DLA to coordinate with the Air Force to establish an Integrated Product Team (IPT) to assess and compare the two systems and report their findings. The IPT found that the two systems had similar capabilities. Through the IPT, it was agreed that DoD EMALL should add functionality desired by the Components (e.g., workflow), but it should not add all the functionality of AFWAY II. Additionally, AFWAY II agreed to re-scope its modernization plans to focus primarily on those areas that EMALL could not satisfy, primarily asset lifecycle management in support of oversight and asset visibility. Thus, the AFWAY II modernization request, once appropriately re-scoped, became a better investment—as did DoD EMALL, now that requirements have been modified to better support its users.

Additionally, during the annual review for the Air Force’s Predictive Model Analysis Tool (PMAT) modernization, the Air Force reported that it was under cost and ahead of schedule. Air Force portfolio managers realized that the program could save $10.6M and, at the same time, accelerate delivery of the capability by re-scoping the investment to avoid functional overlap with two other Air Force systems. In another case, the Air Force realized that by accelerating the deployment of the Enhanced Technical Information Management System (ETIMS) by two years (from FY06-10 to FY06-08), they could decrease the modernization cost from $70.6M to $12.6M.

These cases highlight how the Department is using the investment review process to improve functionality, minimize redundancy, and reduce cost.