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Teamwork: AFSC summit brings together maintenance leaders as ‘tour de force’

  • Published
  • By Holly Logan-Arrington
  • Robins Public Affairs

About 50 senior leaders and subject matter experts from Robins Air Force Base, Georgia, Tinker AFB, Oklahoma, Hill AFB, Utah, and Davis-Monthan AFB, Arizona, gathered at the Robins Conference Center May 7-9 for the 2019 Air Force Sustainment Center Aircraft Maintenance Group Summit.

The group, which included depot and aircraft maintenance group leadership, quality assurance, business operations and engineering team members, met to discuss issues, best practices, and the way forward in depot maintenance.

Col. Jeffrey Martin, 402nd Aircraft Maintenance Group commander, said the opportunity to take the lead to host the summit allowed Robins to showcase its best practices and operations to the other Air Force depot maintenance organizations.

“The theme of this year’s summit was ‘Teamwork,’ which is fitting because none of our organizations can deliver airpower back into the hands of the warfighter without each other’s support,” he said. “The more we can learn from each other, the stronger our Air Force will be.”

The Air Force relies upon the four depot maintenance organizations to extend the service life of organically supported aircraft, making summits like this important to the Air Force. This summit also gave the group the opportunity to practice the Art of the Possible which creates a culture that is focused daily on identifying and immediately eliminating process constraints, Martin said.

“Our ability to share and grow through process development is integral to increasing the depot capability and capacity,” he said. “Warfighters depend on the depots to provide capable weapon systems. We take care of things at the depot level so they don’t have to worry about anything else while in the field.”

Col. Michael Allison, 76th Aircraft Maintenance Group commander from Tinker AFB who attended the conference, said that while each air logistics complex is fundamental to the overall success of the Air Force alone, when put together with the other complexes, the depots become indispensable to the Department of Defense.

“The three Air Logistics Complex AMXGs are incredibly powerful organizations designed to repair and overhaul more than 90% of the aircraft in the USAF inventory. Individually they are foundational to the overall mission success of the USAF, but when leveraged as a single entity they create an innovation and manufacturing tour de force whose individual capabilities pale in comparison to their combined impact. The recent AMXG Annual Summit brought these three organizations together to discuss shared resources, future business capabilities, and Art of the Possible opportunities to move them beyond their current world-class efficiencies and effectiveness. As a result, each of the AMXGs are aggressively embarking on a path of continued process improvement and a goal of surpassing previous year’s outputs and expectations. Quite simply, it has once again prepared each of our AMXGs to continue to build on our reputation as a national treasure.”