PICATINNY ARSENAL, N.J. - The Department of Defense announced in March that a Picatinny organization has won a 2009 DoD Value Engineering Achievement Award.
The Program Executive Office for Ammunition here won the award for implementing value engineering procedures that will save DoD more than $89 million.
Value Engineering, otherwise known as VE, is a function analysis process to identify actions that reduce cost, increase quality and improve mission capabilities across the entire DoD enterprise, according to a DoD news release announcing the award.
The VE awards program is an acknowledgment of exemplary achievements and encourages projects to improve in-house and contractor productivity.
In fiscal year 2009, PEO Ammunition's assigned VE goal was to find ways to save $10 million on PEO Ammo programs, explained Glenn Knudsen, Chief of the Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center's Value Engineering Team.
However, PEO Ammunition achieved $89.585 million in total savings, exceeding its goal by 896 percent.
The success of the PEO Ammunition VE program can be attributed to the leaders' awareness and management of the assigned VE goals, and the establishment of an atmosphere of creativity that led to the completion of six in-house VE projects and one contractor VE project, said Knudsen.
One of the VE projects included creating a mixed M918 and M385A1 40 mm ammunition belt, which has a three-year calculated net savings and cost avoidance of $86.2 million.
The current ammunition used in training and qualifying MK19 gunners is the M918, explained Melissa Wanner, Project Management Engineer.
However, by substituting every third M918 round with a less expensive M385A1 round, a significant reduction in cost of 40 mm training ammunition has resulted.
An entire M385A1belt was not feasible because the M385A1 does not produce any signature upon impact. When the MK19 is fired, gunners usually fire in three to five round bursts. If it was a full belt of M385A1, there would be no indication of where the rounds landed, explained Wanner. However, with the mixed belt, the gunner still sees three to four flashes from the M385A1 M918 down range.
The new MK19 grenade ammunition belt now offers a lower-cost gun training that is still effective. The mixed belt configurations are currently being integrated into training.
Across DoD in FY09, 3,347 in-house VE proposals and 43 contractor-initiated VE change proposals were accepted with actual and projected savings and cost avoidance in excess of $1.94 billion, the news release stated.
A ceremony will be held on May 12 at the Pentagon to recognize the recipients' outstanding achievements through the application of value engineering.
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