Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md. (March 14, 2014) -- The sergeant individually removes each item from its home in the musty warehouse. His Soldiers follow suit and stiffly lug out boxes of night vision goggles toward the team on hand to inspect the equipment.
This type of systematic attention to detail is a patient man's game; agonizingly slow, but imperative to an overarching mission. For the U.S. Army Communications - Electronics Command Item Unique Identification (IUID) office, helmed by Team Lead Jacob Dozier Jr., it's how everyday business is conducted.
Dozier and his team provide support to local commanders by providing training on these types of tedious tasks, like unit level marking. On this occasion, the 20th CBRNE Command (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, Explosive) contacted the team for assistance with unit level marking. Headquarters, Department of the Army (HQDA) mandated that all equipment unmarked prior to 2004, known as legacy equipment, must be marked and entered into the Department of Defense (DoD) IUID registry by 2015.
According to Dozier, equipment manufactured for the DoD after 2004 is automatically IUID marked and scanned into the registry. Every time the equipment receives maintenance, it is entered into the system as a lifecycle event. This allows each piece of equipment to be individually tracked and monitored until it is retired and removed from the system. Unfortunately, while still functional, legacy equipment may not possess the required IUID marking. In turn, HQDA tasked the Army Materiel Command to develop unit-level marking in an effort to ensure all inventoried items are marked and entered into the registry.
For commanders with warehouses stacked floor to ceiling with IUID equipment, this could be a daunting task. However, the expertise of Dozier's team and the methodology of their attack seemingly reduce the enormity of this challenge. The team's intent is to train the unit on how to properly conduct these operations. In this scenario, they train the Soldiers about data cleansing; the process of figuring out what's already been marked, what hasn't and whether it matches the property book.
"We start by going through the unit's property book," said Dozier. "That's what the unit has to go by and everything that's on that list they have to actually mark. Some of it may already be marked, but they need to annotate that that they are."
The night vision goggles are methodically placed on six-foot tables and CECOM's IUID Team begins the data-cleansing process. Using a magnifying glass to assist, Roxanna Brown-Mello, the IUID coordinator, reads off each individual bar code to Brian Breitigan, a logistics management specialist, who enters and later scans them in the system. The team's Nathanial Robinson, also a logistics management specialist and Ryan Adams, the IUID Team's logistics data specialist, uniformly repack the goggles after each entry. Throughout the process, Dozier is instructing and guiding the 20th CBRNE Command Soldiers on the process before slowly integrating them into the operation. After an hour, the IUID team has stepped back from the table and moved into a mentoring role for the remainder of the training. The Soldiers continue the assembly line operation, pausing sporadically with questions about information that fail to marry together in the registry.
"It's not a difficult process, it's just systematic," said Dozier. "This isn't the type of work that you want to have to go back and redo. So it's about providing a commander with the best mechanism to conduct the unit level marking in a timely and efficient manner."
Dozier and his team provide IUID unit level marking training and support to commands at both Aberdeen Proving Ground and Edgewood Area operations.
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