United States Air Force Aims High with an Optimized Supply Chain Strategy

With more than 5,000 aircraft and 650,000 items in 1,500 locations across a global theater of operations, the United States Air Force supply chain is one of the most complex in the world. Delivering integrated supply chain planning for Air Force Sustainment Center locations requires a comprehensive, robust, and nimble solution, that also complies with the strict DoD compliance environment.

With its selection of PTC Service Parts Management (SPM) SaaS solution, the USAF will be able to more efficiently manage its supply chain as well as improve the inventory performance of its operations. Which SPM capabilities are critical to agile and integrated parts planning processes?

• Demand Planning to generate independent (unscheduled) and dependent (scheduled) forecasts, including the expert selection of forecasting algorithms, and the application of causal factors such as flying hours.

• Inventory Optimization to achieve specified weapon system availability while simultaneously minimizing inventory investment and adhering to financial constraints, combining Readiness Based Sparing (RBS) principles, aircraft uptime and fill rate optimization along with other business rules.

• Supply Planning capabilities to produce a supply and distribution plan to correlate repair, purchase and (re)distribution orders with current or future demands. Distribution planning aligns assets to support weapon system availability and to proactively manage material shortages at maintenance/operating locations.

• Exception Management with robust error reporting and event management capabilities to alert users to pertinent information, and make autonomous recommendations to reconcile exceptions within discrete planner work queues for demand planning, inventory optimization and supply planning.

• Performance Management capabilities with analytics, data stratification, metrics, reporting and dash-boarding capabilities to support root-cause and what-if analyses.

Joining other leading aerospace and defense organizations such as the United States Navy, United States Coast Guard, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, Pratt & Whitney and Rockwell Collins, USAF will be able to modernize its highly respected logistics infrastructure. 

See why so many A&D leaders choose PTC Service Parts Management solutions on our A&D page and learn how aviation giant Embraer used PTC’s Service Parts Management solution to improve inventory turns by 35% in this case study.