OFFUTT AIR FORCE BASE, Neb. -- A deployment leadership workshop was held in the 55th Wing Headquarters building on April 30, 2024 by Headquarters Air Force Directorate of Logistics’ (A4) Tesseract Division in conjunction with Goldratt Consulting.
The objective of the workshop was to map out the Wing's current deployment process, identify and validate assumptions, collectively build a high-level Theory of Constraint (ToC) solution and then decide the implementation strategy. This workshop is not a typical out brief, where the consultants recommend a pre-determined solution. Instead, Goldratt shared their analysis, introduced ToC concepts, and then jointly crafted a specific ToC solution for the Offutt deployment process using the intuition and experience of the leadership team in the room.
“Our senior leaders to include our Wing Commander, Col. [Mark] Howard are all incredibly focused on ensuring we remain the most lethal AF in the world,” said Maj. Caitlin Oviatt, 55th Logistics Readiness Squadron commander. “Our business is deterrence but if deterrence fails, we must be ready to win. Our ability to deploy and deliver lethal capabilities at speed and scale is predicated on how effective, efficient, integrated and streamlined our processes are.”
The Tesseract Team is built as a direct report to the USAF Director of Logistics at the Pentagon, built at the Division echelon. This unique positioning provides for direct access to policy makers and major command A4 staffs while providing the opportunity to be directly oriented towards the field to facilitate Airmen ideas and advance ToC methodologies in the Department of the Air Force. Goldratt and Tesseract have worked with various Wings throughout the AF to help solve some of the most challenging problems facing our airmen and the mission.
For the last several months, Tesseract and Goldratt Consulting have been working with the 55th Wing on various improvement efforts, with deployment execution being one of them. The deployment workshop consisted of leadership representation from Operations Group, Maintenance Group, Mission Support Group and Medical Group with the goal of developing a deployment process and solution specifically for Offutt.
Implementation of the process will roll out by mid-summer along with the Wing’s updated Installation Deployment Plan.