“It was very frustrating for a lot of people,” said Ethel Herrera, WD 7.0 Administrative Officer.

Such was Herrera's and her colleagues' experience with monthly reports to track manpower numbers, which include the number of employees on-board and the number of people who have separated from NAVAIR.

“When the data would roll up to headquarters for a final report, the numbers would be inconsistent for different reasons,” she explained. “Reconciling took a lot of time in some cases.”

Not anymore. The NAVAIR Weapons Division staff pulling together manpower numbers now has a more efficient, accurate way to do the job.

“In the end, we were all surprised how simple the solution was,” Herrera said. ““Nobody had dug deep enough to find the root cause before.”

To uncover that root cause and find that solution, a team from WD, AD and HQ 7.1, 7.3, and 7.8 worked with AIRSpeed Black Belt Olivia Lenahan.

According to Lenahan, the team expected the problem to be related to the number of records an analyst was reconciling, but that turned out not to be the case.

“The folks at WD had to pull information from multiple sources, each with different parameters, different criterion, and different standards, and then had to reconcile the data,” she said. “Our analysis showed that difference in how long the task took a BFM was not due to the size of the department they supported.”

The 8-member team found that the root cause was actually inconsistency between personnel data systems, lack of standard definitions of personnel terms, lack of standard report formats, and lack of business rules were the root cause hampering the analysts from providing accurate, timely, manpower reports.

In searching for the best solution to the problem, the team defined specific criteria required for a common system and assessed the personnel systems analysts used. The team determined that a system operated by Navy Office of Human Resources, called HRRS, met their critical criteria.

“The hard part was that OCHR could only send to one claimant in a Command and they were already sending the information to AD,” Lenahan said. “So we found a way to share the information internally.”

“The person who gets the file here shapes the file for WD and someone at WD places the information into the existing WD personnel system,” she said.

The solution provides accurate information without the time required to reconcile data from multiple sources.

The team also developed a Competency Administrator Personnel Dictionary that will be kept current by AD and WD analysts at the competency Level 1 and maintained on the BFMC Web site with specific business rules.

“Now we will also working on standard report formats are being created, and business rules are being developed via the Demographics Mart which is currently in production,” Lenahan said.

“Since we fixed this, I haven’t had to reconcile the data at all,” said Herrera. “It’s great.”

Team members were Charlene Crouch, Judy Dutcher, Laurie Edgecomb, Ethel Herrera, Cecilia Manley, Kathleen Porter, Pam Smith, and Cindy Woods, along with Project Sponsors Roy Parris and Karen Clements.

-USN-