US Air Force Breaks Down Information Barriers

At Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, the US Air Force Personnel Center (AFPC) has made a quantum leap in delivering timely, accurate information that leaders use for confident decision making about the management of human capital and a wide variety of customer relationships.

AFPC implements personnel programs affecting the nearly 400,000 active-duty members and 185,000 civilian employees through major commands and a worldwide network of military and civilian personnel flights. Some personnel matters affecting more than 109,000 Air National Guardsmen and 78,000 Air Force Reservists are also managed at the Center. Its mission is to provide quality service in worldwide personnel operations with integrity, responsiveness and sensitivity to commanders, Air Force civilian and military members, families, retirees and other customers. The retrieval and reports section within personnel operations is charged with providing timely, accurate and relevant information to the leadership of the Air Force for decision making.

AFPC needed a solution to efficiently and effectively provide personnel information to decision makers as well as the ability deploy these results via the Web with confidence in the integrity of the information provided. While AFPC had other statistical tools in house, they turned to SAS to help them analyze and deliver personnel information to their leaders.

Initially beginning with analysis of officer promotions, AFPC expanded the breadth of its use of SAS to include the entire personnel life cycle of military and civilian Air Force members including accessions, compensation, benefits, separations and retirements.

Planning for an Effective Workforce
Faced with the need to downsize in the past, AFPC needed to encourage as many voluntary separations as possible. AFPC had to balance keeping current year costs to a minimum while planning for future year costs and experience levels. Using SAS to produce human capital management information such as the recommended number of promotions that the Air Force should make each year, expected losses and reenlistments, AFPC tested proposed policies and predicted the impact of adding severance pay, early retirement and a costing methodology.

Providing Demographic Information on Demand
A vast number of individuals and organizations ask AFPC for information concerning the existing force structure. Everyone from media outlets such as the Washington Post to government entities like the Office of the President of the United States has inquired about the number and type of personnel that are enlisted in the Air Force. At one time, much of the work within the reports and analysis section centered on answering different aspects of the same questions. To meet this challenge, AFPC developed a SAS-based application called Interactive Demographics and Analysis System (IDEAS) that provides answers to these types of questions through a Web interface. IDEAS provides interested parties worldwide with the ability to tabulate demographic data to suit their needs. The IDEAS Web site is now producing instant demographic information on Air Force personnel – information that previously took days, or even weeks, to obtain.

Previously, analysts spent hours to days responding to individual requests for information. Now, users with Internet access around the world, at any time of day or night, can access the data themselves and have a response in just a few seconds. Results can be viewed in either a browser 3D table or in a format ready to be downloaded into applications such as Microsoft Word or Excel.

Master Sergeant Eddie Stevens, who programmed the interactive package, said, "It's a real testament to the quality of SAS' instructions. I had little difficulty programming and linking our data using SAS/IntrNet software. This will free up our analysts and data retrieval specialists to do the jobs they are actually getting paid for, instead of spending so much time meeting ad hoc requests."

The interactive demographics package is especially helpful for overseas members, who are often at the mercy of time zones. Now they can generate their own information from more than 20 million valid combinations of the data in just a matter of seconds, and download it into spreadsheets and charts during their local hours of operation without having to wait on delays caused by time zone differences.

"SAS/IntrNet software performs as advertised," Stevens said. "We downloaded the instructions, figured out what programming we had to do, learned HTML, programmed our SAS code, and by the time we had all our components written, we got the software. Then, it all just fit together like it was supposed to. Within two days after loading SAS/IntrNet software, our Web application was up and running."

In addition to providing demographic information to various external sources through IDEAS, AFPC must also answer questions that arise internally about personnel data. AFPC needed a solution that would allow it to quickly and accurately respond to internal Air Force requests for personnel information. As a result, AFPC developed a SAS-based, Web-enabled application called Rated Operations and Analysis Reports (ROAR) that allows internal users to access information needed to answer personnel-related questions that may arise at anytime throughout the world. Although reporting this type of information to leadership took days in the past, ROAR enables users to define demographic information in a point-and-click interface and then generate customized reports in a matter of minutes. As a result, ROAR has saved countless hours of staff time because users can personally and accurately obtain the information that they want, when they want it and in the desired form.

Improving Performance Through Evaluation
The Air Force leadership is concerned about its people and seeks feedback through climate surveys. At one time, the survey section had eight people performing survey work. Today, the section uses SAS to survey the Air Force membership via the Web. While the survey section now fields a greater number of surveys, the number of employees needed to produce and analyze the surveys has been reduced from eight to two, an approximate 75 percent reduction in staff.

People, Placement and Career Succession
Ideally, when people enter the US Air Force, they will be placed into a job for which they are qualified and that they will enjoy. To help achieve this goal, the AFPC, along with Basic Military Training, uses SAS to place new recruits and all non-rated cadets from the U.S. Air Force Academy and ROTC into job classifications. As the individuals first enter the Air Force, AFPC uses an optimization program to match a person's job proficiencies, desires and the projected needs of the Air Force to assign the person to a career area. This assignment process is extremely important due to the fact that most of the enlisted forces do not change career fields often. AFPC also uses the class ranks of the cadets to weight their preferences so that higher performing cadets receive the top choices.

Performing promotion analysis is another important function at AFPC. Officer promotion board results are maintained in databases dating back to 1989. With this data, AFPC looks for trends that could impact future capabilities and missions. Through the development of a SAS-based Web application, AFPC delivers promotion board statistical results to the other Air Force units and the public via the Web.

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