The U.S. Army Reserve’s 81st Readiness Division covers a lot of ground – from western Louisiana to eastern Puerto Rico and from northern Kentucky to the southern tip of Florida. The RD has installation-like responsibilities for all the community-based Army Reserve facilities in the region. Its environmental challenges reflect the broad and varied landscapes and ecosystems in which it operates.
To create a continuous improvement ethos and enhance unit performance, the 81st RD has developed a predictive data analytics system used across the unit. The system creates the basis for better analysis of environmental conditions and improved decision-making on how and where to use resources to effectively manage environmental conditions at the more than 250 geographically distributed Army Reserve facilities and 110 maintenance shops in its footprint.
“Our objective is compliance with environmental regulations and continual improvement in both compliance and management,” Dan Thomas, 81st RD environmental chief said. “The 81st RD predictive data analytics system provides an emotion-free examination of the data to highlight issues so that critical problems are identified and brought to the attention of leadership early, before they become urgent.”
For this work, the 81st RD was awarded the 2024 Secretary of the Army Environmental Awards Program award for Environmental Quality in the non-industrial installation category. This category includes large Army installations.
Thomas said the data analytics system developed allows the team to standardize, quantify and display the raw environmental data collected in the field and provides high-level analytics opportunities that are critically important to staying on top of the varied challenges the team deals with. The geographic dispersion, large number of facilities, the number of tenants and the different levels of control the unit has at different facilities have made for a difficult data environment.
“Without the new data system, it is an extreme challenge to understand the depth of compliance issues across multiple programs. While they might hear of an issue here or there, without some predictive analysis, it has been impossible – with the number of programs and the volume of people involved in each – to recognize a systemic or acute concern,” Thomas said.
Decades of personnel turnover and the changing organizational structures within the Army Reserve have only magnified the need and challenge of collecting vital data.
“In each transition over the years, some information critical to environmental compliance did not survive, resulting in fragmented knowledge and documentation for facilities for which the 81st RD is responsible,” said Jason Clutter, an environmental protection specialist at the 81st RD.
Clutter said the centralized collection of specific, critical data now gives the RD a real-time picture of the environmental situation which significantly aides in the day-to-day decision-making as well as long-term planning -- a necessary step in managing such a complex assignment. “This truly allows us to be more proactive than reactive,” said Clutter.
The predictive data analytics system, considering this complex operational environment, provides a central location for information on facilities under 81st RD, helping mitigate both compliance risk and creating a repository to prevent loss of historical organizational knowledge. In addition, by creating a system, the team identified gaps in the data previously collected, plans to close the data gaps, and a method to create decision-point information built on data.
“When the 81st RD started collecting the data and deciding which pieces of data were the most important for evaluating environmental compliance risk, data gaps were identified. In addition, the various federal, state, city, and county regulations and requirements also varied which made things even more difficult and sometimes confusing,” Thomas said. “Data gaps were filled, and regulatory requirements were identified and documented. As a result, the data for all 81st RD sites are organized in a central location as dashboards for several environmental media areas: air quality, cultural resources, drinking water, Environmental Performance Assessment System, natural resources, tanks, stormwater, and wastewater.”
Thomas believes the knowledge the team has gained, along with the operational efficiencies a predictive data analytics system provides, could be useful to other agencies with broad geographical footprints, including other Department of Defense organizations.
“What we have worked hard to do is create a system that gives us access to the decision criteria and data we need to create efficient, effective implementation plans,” Thomas said. “Organizations can benefit from this as they seek to tailor their environmental program to fit their unique environment.”
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