SALT LAKE CITY, Utah---The Tooele Army Depot hosted an Army Organic Industrial Base Summit here, May 3, to provide a forum for candid discussion on the U.S. Army's readiness and continued capability to meet future surge requirements in support of global contingencies and conflicts.
Lt. Gen. Larry Wyche, deputy commanding general of Army Materiel Command, higher headquarters of TEAD, kicked off the forum, the theme of which was "Ensuring Ammunition Readiness".
Wyche told the attendees, all who are commanders and senior leaders of the OIB, "We need your help to optimize the OIB. We need to look at our appropriations, our expenses, and our bottom line to determine how we can become even more efficient. We need to look forward and think of challenges as opportunities, while managing risk in a dynamic, changing environment."
The quarterly OIB Summits provide a forum for cross-fertilization of innovative ideas and best-of-breed techniques. At this summit, commanders and senior leaders presented information about their own depots or installations, covering topics such as best business practices, energy initiatives, carryover metrics, and the use of Logistics Modernization Program.
Col. Roger McCreery, commander of TEAD, shared information regarding TEAD's building-modernization strategy. He showed how several 74-year-old buildings have been renovated to better support TEAD's current needs and have become more energy efficient, too. Toole Army Depot is AMC's leader in alternative energy and McCreery talked about TEAD's current and future projects, including two 1.8 megawatt wind turbines and a 1.5 megawatt solar array field to generate electricity, solar walls installed to heat 14 buildings, changing the use of fuel oil to natural gas, and replacement of inefficient boiler and HVAC systems.
"Within the next two to three years, TEAD expects to become Net Zero for energy use, and expects to generate revenue from the sale of the extra energy it generates," said McCreery.
"We must adapt to the future, building on what we've already done. Let's take the fruit of these productive discussions back to our installations to tweak our processes," said Wyche at the close of the summit.
On May 4 and 5, commanders and senior leaders participated in a depot assessment visit at TEAD. These assessment visits give commanders a second set of expert eyes, to assess various parts of their installations' operations.
The assessment teams viewed TEAD's ammunition peculiar equipment complex; ammunition equipment test site; safety management services; ammo surveillance inspection; ammunition shipping and receiving procedures; less-than-carload/less-than-truckload facility; box and crate facility; and, emergency operations center, where teams viewed a drone demonstration. They also visited a private company, Safety Management Services, Inc., which participates in a public-private partnership at TEAD.
At the end of three days of collaboration and assessment, Wyche commended the commanders and senior leaders of the OIB for sharing information and ideas and stressed that "the time to reshape our Army is now."
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