Edmond Scientific Supports Army Simulators Worldwide

WAGONER, OK - Edmond Scientific Company (ESC) announces its successful participation with the Army's Simulator, Training, and Instrumentation Command (STRICOM) to provide logistics support to more than 7000 Army training devices around the world. As part of the Virtual Training Life Cycle Contractor Support (VT-LCCS) Team led by Dyncorp, Edmond Scientific will perform simulator engineering, obsolescence management, component reverse/re-engineering, configuration management and status accounting, and document/data management services.

Beginning in September of 2001, the ESC project team has created a web-based solution that tracks all configuration and logistical information for each Army training device. At the project's anticipated completion in 2009, ESC will provide the capability to successfully track and manage the configuration of over 7000 training devices, from simulators to circuit cards, located on Army bases around the world.

"We were brought into the project because of our expertise in collecting data, identifying requirements, and establishing a configuration and obsolescence management program," John Pitale, President and CEO, said.

Edmond Scientific is responsible for tracking each software and hardware configuration item contained in the training devices through an online-accessible database. This database will not only document the real-time information on the specific parts in each simulator, known as configuration management, but will also contain information pertaining to the long-term availability of those parts and availability of substitute or replacement parts, known as obsolescence management.

"Obsolescence management has been done in the Army for weaponry, but as far as I know, we are the only one who does this for such a wide variety of simulator systems, and have a database of common and unique parts and components used in the systems," Pitale said.

Obsolescence management allows the Army to plan for obsolescence and budget for solutions. Knowing which components and subsystems will become obsolete or are forecasted to be discontinued allows the Army to work on solutions in a non-crisis manner, giving them time to decide what to do and submit the plan as part of their budget. A database with this capability in the Army has no predecessor.

"We were forced to populate the database by a variety of ways and built a lot from scratch," Pitale said.

The challenge is figuring out what information exists and where to find it.

"Some technical documentation was non-existent, and we needed to perform a physical audit of the devices to determine what configurations we had. In other instances, we had a good indentured Bill of Materials (BOM)," Pitale said. "The information was located in little pockets everywhere. What we did was to condense all the information into one accessible place that is continuously updated."

Pitale said he feels the Army brought ESC into the project because of their unique abilities to develop and operate this kind of solution.

The simulator training devices tracked in the database range from driver and gunnery training simulators to crew coordination simulators used to train the loader, commander, and driver in a particular wartime vehicle. All of the equipment is contained in large training warehouses, and has the capability to train anything from an individual crew to an entire force of men. Edmond personnel have barcoded the components and uses scanning devices to perform annual configuration audits and inventory management.

As part of the project, Edmond Scientific will expand their support to include reliability engineering, collecting and analyzing failure data from different simulator parts, and engineering solutions to improve the reliability of those parts.