Diagnosing the Army's equipment readiness

The new Army Vision, with its emphasis on rapid force deployment and immediate employment capabilities, demands robust equipment and streamlined logistics processes that maximize the ability of soldiers to keep equipment ready to fight. Achieving this goal calls for dramatic progress in the Army's ability to keep equipment ready--a synergistic combination of improving the logistics system and equipment reliability. To do this, the Army needs metrics that fully portray its equipment readiness capabilities, both in the motor pool and during missions, to identify critical preparation and operating shortfalls. These metrics should directly connect the underlying logistics processes and equipment reliability to equipment readiness results so that the Army can target its resources effectively. This document presents a general framework for measuring equipment readiness and linking it to process performance, and it introduces a prototype initiative based upon this framework, the Equipment Downtime Analyzer (EDA). The EDA leverages advances in information technology to better utilize data collected by existing Army information systems. It provides an integrated set of metrics that tie equipment sustainment and reliability to equipment readiness. The authors illustrate potential applications for the EDA and describe its power to provide more complete and effective information for managing equipment readiness. They also discuss. EDA implementation and some of the ways that the Army might enhance it through increased data integration, thereby improving its ability to help the Army understand equipment readiness.