Army veterans may recall attending mandatory training where the first order of business was choosing the correct sign-in sheet with the hopes they would be counted and not have to repeat the session until the following year. Administration personnel will remember monotonous hours typing names from the sign-in sheets into databases with hopes everyone who attended training was accounted for. Thanks to the efforts of several organizations at the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center working together as a team, these woes are becoming a thing of the past.
The Special Troops Battalion, U.S. Army Combined Arms Center Knowledge Management Office and Training Management Directorate have teamed up to create a new sign-in and data management system that reduces errors and cuts down on man hours when it comes to documenting training attendance.
"We used to use -- let's call it -- analog technology," said Lt. Col. Michael S. Johnson, commander, STB. "There would be 15 to 20 different sign-in rosters depending on your organization. You'd find your roster, sign your name, date it and pray that someone got your information so you would get credit for the training that day. For the past five months, we've been using a new, more effective and efficient system."
The team has put in place a process in which a person attending mandatory training presents their Common Access Card to trusted personnel who use Tactical Personnel System scanners to collect relevant information, which the CAC card already contains. The TPS system then automatically builds a spreadsheet, which can be exported and loaded into the Defense Training Management System in roughly 10 minutes.
"With the old sign-in class roster, a training NCO would have to manually input every name individually into DTMS, which is an incredibly time-consuming operation," Johnson said. "Our focus area at STB is a reduced effort of individuals to have to get that information into the database so it becomes automatic."
Additionally, the team has linked DTMS directly to U.S. Army's Strategic Management System, a performance management tool available to all Army organizations and components. This means the training attendance data is automatically added to STB's performance management data for senior leaders to view at their discretion from any digital device that accepts a CAC card.
"Now DTMS is good at looking at individual records, but it's not very good at displaying what the data means for commanders," Johnson said. "We're leveraging SMS in a way that will allow senior leaders to view the relevant information they need to make resourcing decisions in a more efficient manner."
"We are allowing the command to know more about itself when it comes to training," said Lt. Col. Guy Buice, director of the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center Knowledge Management. "By knowing more about our self by using authoritative data, it's substantiated -- it's not 'PowerPoint deep.' Senior leaders can see quantitatively what we do on a day-to-day basis -- are we getting better or are we getting worse, and if we're getting worse, what's making that happen. If we're getting better, what did we do right and can we repeat that."
This innovative system is currently being used at Fort Leavenworth with minor tweaks being applied to the process of sending data automatically from DTMS to SMS, which will continually be a work in progress.
"This process will be ongoing for the foreseeable future, because SMS is constantly evolving and senior leaders will always require new and different data to be reported," said Charlie Ostrand, branch chief for the Requirements Integration Branch, TMD. "Fortunately with all the other infrastructure components in place, these will be relatively easy obstacles to overcome.
The new training data management system is currently seeing use on Fort Leavenworth, but Maj. Guy Workman, S-3, STB, believes it could easily be implemented throughout the whole Force.
"It started out as an STB project then we expanded to CAC," Workman said. "We've just received the 'go ahead' to make this an installation-wide initiative, and are currently receiving more scanners from U.S. Army Human Resources Command. We are going to see how well that works and if all goes as planned, this could easily go Army wide. If we're saving our people 20 to 30 minutes of work per roster, imagine how much time you could save a drill sergeant or basic training operations NCO at the end of the day."
"The reality is we are currently working in a down-sizing Army; budgets are tight," Johnson said. "One of the amazing things about this system is the scanners and the software we are using are already Army property. We are just trying to tie them all together. It's no cost or low cost to the Army to have an enormous impact on man hours saved in the training world."
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