Wal-Mart moving away from firearms

[1776 Rebel]

An interesting article in Government Computer News about how the Air Force sees the capabilities of Wal-Mart.

The Materiel Systems Group of the Air Force’s Enterprise Systems Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, brought AFKS online in 2002. The program’s first goal was to aggregate maintenance information from five base-level maintenance systems. Each company’s maintenance team knew what bedeviled their own aircraft but, across the service, there was no way to show trends, such as faulty parts arriving from a manufacturer.

“Each base had its own basic database, so the initial problem was to provide an integrated, online, ad hoc query capability for a global perspective,” said Mike Riley, the original program manager.

The development team visited a number of Fortune 500 companies, such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc., and learned how they made sense of their data: through warehouses.

“We were impressed by the kind of analysis that Wal-Mart was able to do to keep its supply chain moving,” Riley said. “The Air Force also needs to track a lot of parts and where things are in the maintenance pipeline. Wal-Mart was doing things in hours and days, but the Air Force was doing it in weeks.”

http://www.gcn.com/print/23_30/27531-1.html?topic=news