A US Airman uses an AutoCrib-RoboCrib at Fairchild Air Force Base. (Photo by DOD)
No, UVS is not a new weapon like UAV’s or UUV’s, but “Unmanned Vending Services” for logistics support to 3 major Air Force bases. As a part of the Air Force logistics Generation III Industrial Product-Support Vendor (IPV) contract, worth $750 million, Lockheed Martin will modernize the logistics at Air Logistics Centers (ALCs) located at Hill Air Force Base, Utah; Tinker Air Force Base, Okla.; and Robins Air Force Base, Ga by replacing the way maintenance parts are manually stored and accessed with automated vending systems.
Lockheed Martin: Industrial Product-Support Vendor since 2006
Lockheed Martin was first awarded the IPV II contract in 2006, to provide support to the 3 ALCs which “provide worldwide engineering, maintenance and logistics management for all U.S. Air Force fighters, transporters, missiles and munitions.” All options were exercised for a total of 10 years of performance until 2016. In April 2016, the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) awarded a bridge contract to Lockheed Martin for continued IPV services until a full contract could be awarded.
IPV III
On March 8th, Lockheed Martin announced that DLA had awarded the company the Generation III contract, for a base period of 5 years and value of $750 million.
The contract will include some major changes to the logistics operations in a bid to make things more efficient. The Air Force will be implementing new “Bench Stock Criteria,” reducing the number of National Stock Number (NSN) items from 80,000 to 45,000, probably leading to a drastic reduction in the number of storage bins, the actual access points for all of these parts, from their current number of 211,000. Included in these changes will be the Lockheed-lead installation of AutoCrib RoboCrib vending machines that will begin to stock the parts and tools.
Fairchild Air Force Base in Washington first installed the AutoCrib machines in November 2016 for the period-inspection support section located there. Beyond allowing for a much faster, more efficient dispersal of bench stock items through the automated machines, the inventory time of the items has been cut down from “eight hours… to less than 30 minutes.”
A single machine can hold between 500 to 2000 items, and for the Air Force will include Common Access Card (CAC) authentication for the release and inventory of items. To ensure efficiency in this new experiment, the Air Force has stipulated that the contractor will have to provide the correct inventoried items 99.5% of the time, or a penalty can be levied on the contractor.
After holding the IPV contract for so long, Lockheed Martin now has a unique opportunity to modernize the efforts of these logistics centers, allowing for efficiency and accountability through “direct line accounting, a level of fidelity never before seen when it comes to bench stock.”
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