A Marine Corps Squadron achieves 99% deployment readiness
Opportunity
A Marine Corps support squadron needed to dramatically improve its mission readiness and reporting capabilities, as it was among the worst performers in this category. The unit was looking at various solutions to help drive improvements in this key metric, but most options were very labor intensive and had inherent reporting delays.
Solution
Although business analytics was just a vague concept in 1999 and KPIs/Operational Dashboards were typically only seen in larger corporations, the concept for a data driven and visual approach was proposed to the command leadership. A comprehensive database containing all training/administrative requirements was built and populated with status and key data fields for each Marine.
The database provided a reporting platform for each department, reducing reporting delay from weeks to days and allowed a near real-time database of department readiness.
Numerous dashboards were created for the command leadership and department heads and standard KPIs with associated targets were established. Further analysis of the data and trends highlighted roadblocks and process inefficiencies limiting progress. Identification of these issues allowed the command leadership to focus attention/resources in problem areas.
The result was an improvement in Unit readiness from under 50% to 99% within 6 months of engagement. The scale and speed of improvement was a milestone achievement in 1999.
Details
Industry: Military
Skills: Database Development, Process Improvement, Business Informatics, Data Visualization