ETIMS- A Force Multiplier for the DoD

  • Published
  • By Greg Zelinski
  • Business and Enterprise Systems Directorate
WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio – The motto of the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center (AFLCMC) is: “If Airmen fly it, fuel it, transport it, drive it, wear it, shelter in it, communicate with it or drop it on targets….AFLCMC provides it!”

In order to do any of those things, Technical Orders (TOs) are needed. 
 
TOs are military orders containing the authoritative procedures and instructions for operating and maintaining all U.S. Department of the Air Force equipment and systems.  TOs ensure sortie generation rates, weapon system and mission reliability, and the safety of our personnel.  The use of TOs is mandatory; failure to follow is subject to court-martial.
 
Historically, the TO ordering process was error prone and time to receive TOs was too long resulting in significant safety and maintenance concerns. Communicating important changes from maintainers that impacted safety took 209 days on average to process and more than two months to distribute new or updated TOs. 
 
Addressing these deficiencies in TO management was essential in order to shorten distribution timeframes and streamline existing physical media TO processes to improve readiness and reduce the safety of flight risks inherent in the previous legacy systems.
 
To address the shortfalls with the legacy TO Management systems, Enhanced Technical Information Management System (ETIMS) was developed and deployed on Feb. 29 2008 in support of the Air Force’s No.1 Priority for business transformation - Synchronize the Supply Chain and Installation Management with Operations – Globally.
 
ETIMS is the centerpiece of the Enterprise Air Force (AF) TO Vision: “… to provide user friendly, technically accurate, and up-to-date digital technical data at the point of use that is acquired, sustained, distributed and available in digital format from a single point of access for all technical data users.”
 
It is the Air Force System of Record for TO management and is the Air Force’s Enterprise Defense Business System for managing TO records. It provides access to the official TO cataloging, managing, storing, distributing, and viewing capabilities needed by the operators and maintainers to support all Air Force weapon systems and equipment items. 
 
ETIMS enables a fully integrated electronic TO (eTO) capability to view and use technical data at the point of use.  It ensures Air Force TO library currency & accuracy and provides a fully integrated Print on Demand (PoD) service in partnership with the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA)’s Document Services Online (DSO). 
 
ETIMS supports approximately 178,000 users at more than 300 sites worldwide. It also supports approximately 60,000 eTOs, 30,000 eTools, 14,000 paper TOs, and more than 13,000 TO libraries across the Air Force Enterprise.  Agencies that rely on ETIMS for Air Force-related TOs and Computer Program Identification Numbers include the Army, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard, Foreign Military Sales (FMS), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, The White House, and numerous Military Industrial Complex partners.  As the authoritative data source for TOs, ETIMS also provides essential information to its interface partners – the Reliability and Maintainability Information System for Time Compliance Technical Order & CPIN metadata, the Security Assistance Technical Order Distribution System for FMS TO metadata, the Technical Order Authoring and Publishing (TOAP) system for TO and CPIN metadata and DSO for PoD metadata.
 
Design and deployment is based on frequent incremental delivery of capabilities that build upon the previously deployed core capabilities.  The ETIMS migration to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud 1 environment and leveraging Agile Principles allows for processes to mature across the user community and enables streamlining and process improvement realized by the rapid delivery of follow-on capabilities.  ETIMS has been modernized over the years to provide a fully capable Air Force enterprise TO Management system. 
 
Duplicative, stove-piped, and weapons system-unique capabilities that were augmenting ETIMS drove high sustainment costs and prevented the realization of a single Air Force enterprise TO Management solution.  Since its initial deployment, ETIMS has either obviated or subsumed over 30 legacy systems.  Most recently, in 2020, both the Aircraft Product Maintenance System (APMS), which was a system for the management of Preliminary TOs (PTOs), and the Automated Computer Program Identification Number system were subsumed.  Since then, ETIMS additionally manages approximately 45,000 CPINs and over 1300 CPIN libraries across the AF Enterprise. 
 
Two of the largest enhancements that were included in the latest major release of ETIMS were adding the AFTO 22 process for recommending changes to TOs and adding security measures that incorporated additional data protections needed by the Nuclear Enterprise TO community.  Here are just a few of the actual comments from the warfighters who participated in the User Evaluation Test for that release.
 
“I’m really excited about the recommended change functionality.”
“This will eliminate lost and missing AFTO 22s that exist with our current processes.”
“This will really help the ICBM’s with our AFTO 22 process. Today users are often confused and ETIMS will put an end to all of those problems”
“A huge step forward for the nuclear community”
“Not one cross boundary situation occurred for nuclear enterprise TOs”
 “It doesn’t work like I thought it would, it works like I hoped it would for nuclear enterprise TOs”
 
In addition, the extended capabilities provided in that release enabled an additional five major weapon systems to move all of their technical data to ETIMS. Transitioning the C-17, KC-46, RQ-4, U-2 and MQ-9 to ETIMS is saving the Air Force a combined total of $2.8 million a year.
 
Currently, ETIMS is in works to further support the user community by adding the capability for iOS-based devices like iPads to be fully supported in the field.  This will enable the warfighter another avenue for displaying eTOs where the use of Windows-based tablets is suboptimal.
 
The education and functional support aspects of ETIMS are provided by the Air Force Technical Order Field Support Team. This team is staffed to provide a single point of access for TO and CPIN users worldwide, providing functional and technical field level help desk, training, user guides, and software test support for the AF standard TO Management systems and associated TO/CPIN business processes including DSO, eTOs, and eTools.
 
Since its inception, Warfighter benefits that ETIMS delivers include:
  • Returning approximately 6,000 man days per month back to aircraft maintenance
  • Freeing up maintainers for primary mission - aircraft maintenance
  • Reducing error rate of currency and accuracy of TOs from 30 percent to less than two percent
  • Reducing time to get updated TOs from three weeks to overnight or less
  • Reducing time to update and maintain accounts from five days to one
  • Improving safety by providing TO updates to users up to three weeks faster
  • Eliminating entire warehouse buildings worth of TO inventory with Print on Demand capability
  • Reducing shipping costs by as much as 75 percent with local printing
  • Reducing shipping times from weeks to days
 
On March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami hit Japan.  As a result, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant suffered severe damage causing radiation leaks and damaging several reactors.  In response, the Air Force immediately prepared to send assets to the area to assist the Japanese people in dealing with this catastrophe.  ETIMS was notified that a TO critical to the identification and handling of aircraft and material contaminated with radioactive debris had just been digitized and was needed by our Airmen who were in transit.   The TO was immediately loaded and was electronically available to the mission before the aircraft touched down.  This is just one example of the critical role ETIMS plays in supporting the success of our warfighters.
 
The ETIMS Team, including our A4 customer and commercial partners, are very proud of delivering a capability that allows the Warfighter to do their jobs better, safer, faster and more efficiently.  To quote one of the many positive comments from the field, “ETIMS has become our go-to system to provide our warfighters timely, accurate, and complete technical information in a digital format at the point of use and at a much lower cost.”