Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul Initiative Contract Award

  • Published
  • By Jeff Stephan
  • Business and Enterprise Systems Directorate

MAXWELL AIR FORCE BASE, Ala., -- The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center’s Business and Enterprise Systems Directorate recently awarded a $32M small business contract to Diligent Consulting, Inc. for the design, development, integration,  test, deployment and sustainment of a web-based Maintenance Repair and Overhaul initiative (MROi) solution using unmodified commercial software.  

“MROi will provide the Air Force with an integrated capability for planning, scheduling, and executing organic depot maintenance to support agile planning, optimized workload assignment, and resource allocation,” said Dean Peebels, BES’ program manager for the system. “It is expected to fill a void by providing leadership with accurate, consistent, and timely data to conduct strategic decision making and support larger Department initiatives, such as Financial Improvement and Audit Remediation.”

MROi will also standardize operations across the Air Force Sustainment Center Commodities, Electronics, Missile, and Propulsion Maintenance groups. It will be used at Robins AFB, Tinker AFB, and Hill AFB, as well as six ancillary sites.

Eventually, MROi will support up to 11,500 users as it is implemented through the following four deployable capability releases:

Release 1:  Standardized, Auditable, Enterprise Visible Work Control Capability

Release 2:  Engineering Support and Supply Support with Maintenance

Release 3:  Optimized Maintenance Supportability

Release 4:  Agile and Consistent Maintenance Decision Capability  

Lori Bury, AFSC’s functional lead, pointed out that implementation will be challenging.

“Each organization will have to transform their current site-specific business operations to the agreed upon new standard process, as well as become familiar with the new supporting system,” Bury said. 

The MROi software will provide support for many more logistics activities and is designed to be a major pillar of the Air Force’s Logistics Information Technology modernization currently underway.

There was considerable upfront planning to incorporate commercial and DoD best practices and reduce cost.   MROi will be the first Air Force Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to be developed in a production representative environment hosted by the Defense Information Systems Agency. MROi will also be the first ERP system to leverage tools and services from the Air Force’s newly designed Common Computing Environment managed by AFLCMC/HNI.  And thanks to the extensive business process reengineering performed by AFSC, MROi will leverage out-of-the-box functionality with approximately 90% fewer Reports, Interfaces, Conversions, & Extensions (RICE) than other Air Force ERP-based systems.

The MROi team has been busy preparing for contract award and performing risk reduction in the Common Computing Environment. 

“It has been a challenge aligning this acquisition effort with the Common Computing Environment technical architecture, common tools and services,” said Paul Schaeffer, the MROi deputy program manager.  “But it will allow the System Implementer to focus on delivering capabilities rather than building and maintaining program unique development, test and production infrastructure. MROi is one of the Air Force’s best planned information technology initiatives to date, with the first delivery of capabilities expected within two years.”