AFSO 21: faster, cheaper, better, smarter

  • Published
  • By Airman 1st Class William O'Brien
  • 95th Air Base Wing Public Affairs
EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. --  Air Force Smart Operations for the 21st Century wants to enable Edwards Airmen to spend their time and resources more effectively and eliminate unnecessary time on the job.

The purpose of AFSO 21 is to establish a process that embraces, delivers and shares measurable continuous process improvement across the Air Force.

"AFSO 21is the Air Force's dedicated effort to maximize value and minimize waste in all of our processes," said Rita Kellas, Air Force Flight Test Center AFSO 21 facilitator. "To fully integrate continuous process improvement in everything we do to support the warfighters capabilities."

The goal of AFSO 21 is for Airmen to identify, implement and share improvements at all levels of the organization and throughout the Air Force.

"AFSO 21's concept is problem solving, we're trying to get personnel who are closest to the problems to identify where the deficiencies are so they can be resolved," said Ms. Kellas. "We all work within a process and what we're trying to do is get people to think, 'how could I do my job more effectively every day?'"

The base's AFSO 21 team governing process implements leadership oversight at every level of evaluation. It will also designate AFSO 21 points-of-contacts across the base.

"This will get a lot more people involved in AFSO 21, which will drive a culture change, said Jim Briggs, AFFTC AFSO 21 team lead. "Having the POCs will make it easier to allow everyone to always have someone to turn to if they have an improvement idea and it will also allow us to disseminate things down more quickly."

The base's AFSO 21 program isn't intended take credit for any organizations improvement ideas or to take the improvement process over from them, Mr. Briggs said.

"We are here to guide them based on the knowledge we have of what other organizations have done when they've come across similar problems," he said.

AFSO 21 has a data base; Air Force Continuous Process Improvement management tool. Its purpose is to allow people to look at prior improvement efforts from across the Air Force, saving the time by eliminating the possibility of repeating the same process over again.

"The Air Force has a program and every CPI event is put into this AF wide data base so if some comes to us and wants to do an improvement event and they can check this data base and look at the results to improvement events that have already happened, saving them time by sharing the results across the Air Force so similar units don't need to repeat the same process over again."

In the past year, Edwards personnel have saved money, time and resources by holding AFSO 21 plans and programs. These programs have increased productivity, improved energy efficiency, increased critical equipment availability and sustained safe and reliable operations.

"AFSO 21's success requires everyone challenging each other to improve their processes," said Ms. Kellas. "Doing that will allow us to get our jobs done safely and effectively in the future."