uh my name is Mark matky uh I manag the dod business for service now I've been with the company uh about nine years took a short sabatical uh but came back and I I want to introduce Doug Enfield uh Doug you want to introduce yourself uh my name is Doug Enfield I work for uh the department of the army uh Within Army material command installation management command and I am the Public Works systems branch chief so we we maintain all of the technology that the directorate of Public Works uses at the installation nice and uh I didn't mentioned this earlier but uh I'm a former Marine and I'll just tell you many many years ago I mean this is like almost uh yeah like 20 years ago uh I was going through my initial training which is 365 days on the dot is what it was from when I showed up till when I was allowed to actually engage with an enlisted person going through my my training and uh I was at the basic school down in quanico and we were leaving to go on uh a hike and it was going to be like a four or five hour hike and as we were leaving I remember there was like this little like creeping thing of mold on on the wall right and our hallway was probably about 75 500 yard long and there was just like like I said just this little creeping thing of mold didn't think anything of it we go out on our hike we come back from humping and uh we opened the door to walk in the hallway and it was like something out of a movie the entire hallway no exaggeration just hovered in this mold it had gone 75 yards in like five hours it was insane and uh so the Marine Corps being the Marine Corps they're like all right everyone on this side of the barracks grab grab a mattress and they dragged it over to the other side of the barracks that didn't have the mold yet and we buddied up six to a room for about three weeks while they then brought in what looked like a HazMat team to kill this thing with bleach or whatever it is that they you know delivered uh I tell that story because on one of the weekends that I had leave I go down to what's now Fort Eisenhower down in uh in Georgia and uh my buddies who had commissioned in the Army like hey come on down for the weekend I was like all right it's cool so I follow their directions and I get to the Best Western off base and I was like man how are these lieutenants afford to stay in a hotel on the weekends you know I guess the Army must be doing better than Marine Corps because I I was like dead broke at the time so I get there and I'm like man how do you guys afford this like oh no no no we live here and I was like what do you mean you live here like well we had a little mold problem in our Barrack so they moved all the lieutenants out into the Best Western rinkor was like no no we're we're doing six toour room we'll figure this out so I say that because uh what we're going to talk about today is uh a a web service a capability that Doug spearheaded with the Army uh and I thought it was just such an interesting story about um a user experience and and a good Showcase of taking something taking action against the problem and applying the same dexterity the same usefulness that would have using Uber as you know on your phone as to solving a problem within the dod right so anytime we're solving something in the government world it's like a horse designed by committee right you get a a camel right so uh I thought this was really good so uh let's start with Doug what is Arma so Arma stands for Army maintenance.com um and you heard that.com correctly we are uh on a commercial website and that is because uh we service anyone who lives or works or visits an army maintained installation so we are out on the commercial side to uh make ourselves not only available to service members and their families but all of those people who who work and visit our installations uh in 2019 uh there's something that we have coined the Army housing crisis uh where we took some very bad press that turned into some Congressional uh sessions where my bosses at the three and fourstar level had to answer some questions to Congress about the state of our privatized housing so our housing that was maintained by our privatized partners and and were people getting the level of service that the Army was paying for uh and it turns out we needed better controls in place to track when maintenance was submitted and whether or not that maintenance was completed and so we Congress put out some mandates and said our privatized partners are required to have digital systems in place to interact with their customers and uh General Perna who was the fourstar Commanding General of AMC at the time said well the Army is actually uh the one who maintains most of the housing in the government with uh Army Family Housing overseas and of course all of our Barracks worldwide and he said if we're going to require our partners to do it then we need to have the same requirement for ourselves and that's where Army maintenance.com was born and so we needed a way to be able to digitally communicate with our customers have them be able to take pictures write descriptions of the problems that they were having in their housing in barracks and submit it to their local directorate of Public Works so that they could uh maintain those things uh this was a brand new thing we were we were uh taking this technology and filling a space where nothing existed before it uh that was a a pretty radical thing to do because before it was the call and pray method with the directorate of Public Works at your installation you call them up you tell them you have a problem and then you begin praying that somebody would respond to it there was no way to track it without continuing to call back to them and so now we created a website where they could go see the problem that they had submitted whether or not it had become a work order whether or not it had been completed uh and and see it throughout its life cycle and when it was finished they would get a notification and ultimately a survey at the end so they could tell the local DPW how they have been doing and so uh we started that in in uh early or late 2019 was when the program started we actually uh got a contract in place in August of 2020 and we W live in December of 2020 which is a very expedited timeline uh a year after that in the spring of 21 we went fence to fence not just housing and Barracks but everything that a DPW maintains on an Army maintain installation so we have every building every facility all the utilities all the roads uh everything that that a DPW touches if you go onto an Army Installation you can go to Army maintenance.com submit it and Arma will create a request that goes to the local folks to fix it now I've seen this movie before right a general comes in was like this is what I want go do it uh so my question is when you first started like what what was the first major muscle movement that you had to do to kind of get this thing rolling uh you know the first thing that uh we had a maintenance system in place and we still have that and that's our system of record uh the general front Enterprise business system in the Army G fibs which handles all of our financials Asset Management maintenance and that so one of the first things was we wanted to connect to that because we still had that Financial requirement to connect to that so getting that connection uh there were web services that g fibs had available that I had been trying to connect to from from my uh uh AO for a long time and finally once we had what we call the fourstar juice once we had that leadership engagement at the top level that said you will make this happen uh the wheels started rolling and so uh once we were able to get that contract in place we were able to get geibs on board with what we were doing I think that's what really got us uh moving in the right direction and and what was you think like the first win that you recognized that like this is working uh the the minute we went live uh we started to see organic uh user interaction right we started to see registrations coming in uh we had the sergeant major of the army put out a tweet that's about the extent of the advertisement we have so uh not very many people see that so most of what we had was trying to reach down to the garrisons and soldiers telling other soldiers hey I put this in I registered and uh they they were able to start uh putting those cases in those maintenance requests and from that they started to see things get fixed and then when the surveys started coming back in and they were mostly positive that was really the first time we were like okay we're doing the right thing here awesome so the smash hashtagged armad and hopefully got a following I don't know about you guys I I should probably follow the S the arm foot I don't just yet um um so how is Arma used today so we are still primarily in the environment that I uh I just explained where we have customer interaction so if you go out to Army maintenance.com you you create your account you can take a picture you can submit uh you can submit for any facility anywhere on the installation doesn't have to be just yours or the one you registered for uh we really encourage people to to put those uh in for for any problem that they see on an Army Installation uh and so that that is our primary use which is uh a service now customer service management license that's all of our users have a CSM license uh we are trying to grow the program Beyond just customer interaction uh which you know interacts with with geibs and creates the actual work orders in GBS we have a couple of pilot sites at Fort Campbell in USAG Bavaria where we are actually doing the work orders full life cycle management of Maintenance from the customer to the technician they get everything on a handheld we're trying to go paperless uh pictures are taken not only by the customer but by the technician when they finish a job and the customer then is uh in interacting with that work order throughout the entire process and so it's G pretty well at those pilots and how is that different from how it was before like from the user experience piece like for the technician the uh the customer and Leadership how's that kind of work uh well for the user uh which we always start with like I said we we fill the gap with a we gave them a document they could track and a website that they could track when their where their problem was at and what was going on with it and the biggest thing uh part about that was not just so they could see the status of the order previous to to ARA's existence nobody knew when their problems were fixed unless it was a broken window and you could see the window was broke but for a lot of things of working on air conditioning or leaks happening behind walls or things like that people would submit the problem and they never knew whether or not Public Works had worked on it and so uh it wasn't until they called back or they saw the fix happening now we have a way that we alert them uh different steps of the process you know a work order has been created uh the work has been completed the technician has a question and you'll get a text or an email and and or needs to be let into a certain area so we have a lot more uh customer interaction and that's what most of our customers tell us we before we had this system we didn't know where anything was at now we can track through its life cycle uh from a technician standpoint uh we have some pretty good metrics on this because now we get pictures and we never got pictures before and that might sound like a simple thing but it reduced our technicians time on site they before ano at the especially at the installations where we're using FSM they would go out a little more about 2.1 times were trips to the site to fix the work and we're seeing it about solid one time at the site to fix the work and it's like how do we get all the way down to one well we have several tickets they take no trips to the site because they're able to see the picture and call the user or contact them and say this is how you can fix it I don't need to come out on site to fix this so there are there are several requests we get where they don't even take one trip so we we've been able to reduce so from the technician standpoint the picture is worth way more than that description of of what the user sends in so so those pictures have really helped us out and from a leadership standpoint they now know the scope of what is being reported right we before when you sent it over to public works a lot of times they would they would accept the work or they wouldn't accept the work that stuff that was not accepted we never tracked it before we didn't know how much stuff we were just saying oh public work doesn't do that or we already have that problem or things like that we can now TR uh we can track the full scope of the requirement and you were telling me earlier about um the way you were capturing the surveys right uh the old way was like only the squeaky Wheels get get heard but now you're you're able to get kind of a better Crosscut of of FO yeah so for for every maintenance request that goes in when it gets closed out we send a survey to say how is your local public works doing um is anybody I don't know if we have any army folks in here hopefully you do I'm sure you've heard of the infamous ice right the customer inter or was an interactive customer experience ice comments are always negative um almost always they're they're they're most of part negative and so when a Garrison Commander looked at his Public Works how are you doing he just saw these negative comments and that was all he had to go on was you know hey DPW why are you letting these things fall through and not fixed and people are unhappy with our surveys we have about a 6% response rate on our surveys and I know that sounds like a small number but across the industry it's usually about 2% uh so we get a good response rate out of our surveys and of those 6% the ones we get get back 92% of them are positive four stars are above right so so we see a huge response in the positive yes we have negative comments yes people are unhappy with some of the work that we do but the vast majority they're very happy this is something that the DPW and the Garrison Commander has never been able to track before and we're able to say hey we're doing a 92% good job we need to clean up the 8% and that's that's a complete change of the mindset from a Garrison Commander perspective uh compared to before nice this reminds me I I wish I would have uh been able to send pictures when I was in Iraq uh I was at an outpost that I had to only man for like four weeks while they ripped out the old platoon and myelon was kind of the standin force for that and uh you know I grew up in the suburbs never worked on cars I'm not very technical right I really don't know all that stuff and uh I'm there uh you couldn't go outside during the day because you'd get shot it was very uh hotly contested highly kinetic environment and so we're in this this building we don't see daylight and then all of a sudden like a week into us being there power goes out everything just shuts down right and now we go to backup battery I we call back to a higher headquarters and I was like like I don't know what's going on but all the power just went out like you know I'm trying to figure out how we're troubleshooting this whatever and like five minutes later they get a technician to get on the phone they're like sir have you check the fuel in the generator and I was like wait we have a generator you know and so it turns out that is exactly what happened we just ran out of fuel so that was like a a dumb Lieutenant move but uh cover that up had I just been able to communicate they would have quietly done that off the net and it wouldn't have been as embarrassing but so when uh so when when Arma actually launched I'm I'm curious um H how other than like s major saying okay you know you guys should check this out uh what do you think worked best for or people was it just like word of mouth or like how did how did it work versus how do people just know about it today so one of the biggest wins that we had is availability that like I said that doc that we have uh before uh we had this uh digital uh service where you could go to a website and register and submit figuring out how to contact your public works on an installation is not easy for those folks that raise their hand work on an Army Installation you know it might not be easy to find a phone number who's the right person to contact how how do I get something fixed and so uh and then a lot of times there are things like facility managers what we call R andus uh in the Army and and how do I go through them do I go up through my chain of command how do I get something fixed right and so this really shortened uh the length of that problem I have a problem I want to get it fixed and we're trying to shorten that length so whether you're an E1 you're a contractor that works on the installation you're a civilian you're you know uh the the general spouse you can go to Army maintenance.com and submit a problem that you see regardless of rank or station or any type of qualification other than registering uh with our web with our website then you can submit it and so that is really uh uh the availability to all people on an Army Installation and being able to submit from from anywhere in the Army has really what uh has has grown our system nice and uh do you have any kind of recent examples of how this is being used today or or something like a vignette that people be like all right I I get it yeah uh Mark you're setting me up for this one right sorry we talked about this that's why I'm not I don't host the TV okay Sor right uh I my son is is a uh an E2 right now stationed over in Germany in Kaiser Slaughter and uh he just got to his duty station in January and we were having a talk on the phone and I'm I'm asking of course uh with with my job and what I have I'm like how are the barracks is everything working is everything you know that that's my first question um and he says well yeah everything's fine he's in an older Barracks it was built in the 1950s so it's definitely one of our older Barracks buildings and so uh it has a communal shower right with four shower heads in there and he said only two of the four showerheads work in there so sometimes you have to wait uh to take a shower in the morning after PT and I you know immediately give him the pitch that I'm giving all of you right now right that Army maintenance.com is out there you got to go register takes some pictures send it into your DPW and uh he does that he goes uh Thursday afternoon he goes in he takes pictures uh the picture he took was two showerheads running and the other two not running which okay so he uh Grand right uh and he he submits that and then the next morning on Friday morning he tells his platoon Sergeant E7 that uh you know hey sard I I submitted this and and the platoon sard looks at him and goes you're not allowed to do that you're not allowed to you're your need to living in the beish you just need to suck it up and just and and live with that fact and uh my son with a little bit of uh back talk that I'm very well familiar with came back at him and said said no no no Sergeant this is for everybody and and we can submit and uh platoon Sergeant wasn't buying it until later that morning with deep DW showed up with a couple of shower heads and fixed the shower that day that was not I didn't pull any strings I didn't call the DPW that was not me uh just happened organically and now the entire Battalion is registered uh in our system and you know they believe in it so that that's really right is that uh as we see things get fixed quicker uh that's obviously going to help our program more than anything absolutely that's awesome uh yeah I think back to you know when I was in the Marine Corps like if there's like a broken showerhead it'd be the first sarden or the gunny be like you two grab some wrenches come with me and like more than likely none of them are qualified to fix the shower head right so like some morning some poor Lance corporal is in there showering and you know the showerhead comes off and hits him in the face so that's uh that's awesome you guys have that efficiency um as we look to the Future uh what you know where do you think armo would be like a year from now so right now I mentioned those two pilot sites at Fort Campbell and Bavaria that we're doing uh the field service management full life cycle of that uh we are seeing some uh tremendous gains in the uh efficiency of our Public Works and and how quickly they are able to solve maintenance issues and so uh the the slide that that he is showing up there shows uh a little bit of of where we're coming from those and I I'll explain those in a minute but our our hope is to to to grow this program Beyond these two pilot sites and hopefully make this the maintenance system of record for uh Public Works throughout the Army as you see there on the blue lines I know it's very small uh being presented up there this was 12 months worth of service requests and how long they got how long they took to get completed for a month or for uh month by Monon for a year before we went live with FSM so uh on average of both sites at most it was about 31 33 days to complete an order whether a priority one or two or three regardless of the priority type that was the average uh time it took to complete an order uh and and overall was about 28 days across both installations that it took uh to complete a uh what we call demand maintenance order so if somebody submitted something you could expect within about 28 days it would be fixed what we saw after you see the green lines there where we W live and we have seen a steady decrease we saw a little bit of a learning curve at for camp gble as they figured out how to use the system uh we took their knowledge over to Bavaria and they've just gone down ever since uh to where we have seen a steady decrease and the very last there is less than 5 days so in less than a week from submitting uh a maintenance request a service member somebody who lives or works on an installation is seeing that request get fixed from 28 days to less than 5 days right that's I don't need to explain that anymore that that s itself of why we want to go forward uh with that um the early March numbers that I wasn't able to get on this slide so far in March were less than four days so they're continuing to get better and we're doing that through uh we have a lot less administrative time because we don't do any of the paper right we're we're almost completely paperless the technicians are actually entering it in on mobile devices and so there's no clerks that have to go through and that added time to the process uh the time uh spent going to the work site multiple times we have less of that so all of those things has added up to us being able to uh to really get this down and one of the really good news stories if you're in the maintenance world at Fort Campbell what we've seen is a huge increase in the amount of preventative maintenance that they're performing so we've seen preventative maintenance orders in geibs go up significantly uh 40 to 50% because they have time to do them before they didn't have time to do but we we've created more time in the technician schedule to be able to to do preventative me that's awesome and I know we talked earlier um before the session uh so you didn't miss anything uh on how AI or Genai could play a role then you told me that hey actually we use artificial intelligence today um can you give some examples of of what you're doing with that we have a couple of examples of of AI and uh uh with the explanation a little bit of gen it's I'll say we have ai and that's one to find duplicate requests so we want I want duplicate requests people throughout the Army say what you do duplicate requests kill our time they they they they cause us to chase our taals when we're getting the same request over and over again my hope is that we get all the duplicate requests we can and we put them into parent child relationships and we have one work order that gets done with many different requests because traditionally what we've done in in the DPW is when a duplicate of requests comes in somebody calls in and says hey I have this problem yeah we already know hang up the phone right and what did you just tell your customer I don't care that you called I didn't need that input I didn't need you to call that in now with Arma we take all these requests we uh associate them with one work order and now everyone that submitted it feels valued and that their input was important to the completion of this order which is a a big difference with with our relationship with our customers uh so we're using AI to uh identify those duplicative requests when things come in with similar descriptions similar locations uh so that our clerks can then bundle them together in this uh requests we're also using AI to identify those negative survey comments because we want to respond to those right we don't want to let negative survey comments just sit out there that's how we got into the whole housing crisis in the first place we want to respond to those and be able to take care of those things right away and so AI is identifying those for us and I did not ask you this earlier but I'm I'm curious if you woke up tomorrow morning and all of a sudden you're like why am I in this big house why do I have a driver why do I have four stars on my lapel here uh if if you're you know general for the day um and you could do anything you know what is it that you think you would want to do with this capability that like makes sense for the Army obviously right well I think the the uh the the growth of the field service management uh module uh that we can have a one system with a full life cycle as well as continuing to interact with our other systems of record I mentioned geibs for the Army and I know uh for several other services Builder or SMS uh is something that we are working with surl who owns that system to connect directly to Arma uh have a greater connection to geibs uh and so having a platform in which we have uh many different systems one data set that that is always my goal so to have all these different systems throughout the Army uh that everybody likes to use and they have knowledge in and they're smart in I don't want to get rid of them but I want to have one data set that everybody interacts with through connections so single platform Integrations that engagement layer uh make it frictionless as possible to kind of get this done that's the goal that's awesome uh lesson learn right as you're looking back on uh everything that you've done is there something that you wish someone would have been able to tell you or if you could go back in time be like hey Doug this isn't as big of a deal as you think or like hey maybe you should pay attention to this what would be that advice you give yourself uh when you're creating a system uh that is customer Centric right which is the whole theme of of what we're doing in here today listen to what the customer wants not necessarily what the people who are receiving it want to receive right so we have tried to stay focused to the best of our ability on on the customers who need maintenance as opposed to the dpws who are receiving it they're not going to like anything we give them because it's different than what they have today and that's just the nature of it uh but what we really want to focus on is a better experience uh for those people who live in the barracks for those people who are dealing with with pothole in the road uh for those people who are affected by the power outage that is needs to be our Focus we spend a lot of time trying to make the system just so for the public works when really uh that that customer experience is what drives us and that's ultimately what leaders want to fund and grow is something that the customers enjoy even though it might be hard for us on the government side uh if it's easier for the customer we're going to continue to do it nice and was there was any one little like tweak that you did and all of a sudden it like relieved pressure somewhere and you like like we should have done that earlier I don't know if I have uh uh a single thing uh that that we turned uh one thing that uh we didn't uh pursue right at the front was CAC authentication right so that we would have a multi it's not multiactor but a but a smart card authentication uh like we have in the dod we started out with username and password uh once we got CAC authentication not only for our DPW folks but customers also uh can CAC authenticate that really opened up uh what we were able to do uh for those customers getting into the system the specialty leadership non-commissioned officers who were in charge of the soldiers in the barracks could Now log in see reports see things that were going on in their facility that's awesome that uh that makes people's job so much easier um one other like lesson learn learned as far as looking back if you had to give people advice that are in here they're like man maybe maybe I can do that for the Navy maybe I can do that somewhere else uh what would be like the biggest piece of advice you would give it's that one's pretty simple because that is Engage The Leader at the highest level that'll listen uh without a doubt uh a lot of times uh within my command or within my my directorate everybody liked the idea nobody was really willing to push for it once it three and four star level they wanted to have a system it happened so so if you can get that requirement as high up as possible and get uh senior leaders to listen that's going to be the the the juice that that gets the job done funny fact uh I was once given the tertiary duty of managing the inner service rifle Championship matches it's a three-day match at quanico that very boring okay it's like golf if you don't like golf okay except shooting and uh no one ever rsvpd to show up to these events and I somehow managed to uh get the common of the Marine Corps to be the opening shot where we set up these like uh diesel drums with uh explosives and when he shoots it blows up like the entire Target and everybody loves it uh got him to show up and all of a sudden with leadership engagement every General that had sent regrets was like that was a mistake I'm actually available that day and it was it was it was a packed house and my boss was like why is everybody here I was like commod SC s he like okay good to go so uh that's awesome we will uh take questions for just a few minutes if if anyone has any anyone ah yes have uh so the the question was if we've looked at areas outside of the directorate of Public Works and what we call you know facility or Asset Management to include things like vehicles or possibly weapon systems and things like that uh I I have not we we do have um service now capabilities that are coming online and using the model that we have created with uh with our authority to operate and with our infrastructure and what we have created with CAC authentication who are using our model to try to stand up similar systems to accomplish those different missions but but within mine I'm I'm only funded to maintain facilities so I'm not trying to grow the program beyond what I will get paid to grow the program to although that would be be crazy we shows up one day he's like we're tracking this they'd be like what awesome I think we have time for one more question yeah hi good morning I'm race Burton from tcom I was just curious in reference to when you were mentioning how you want to combine multiple tickets under one and track it through that make it kind of a whole business case how are you dealing with that as far as your your metrics go when you have a a single ticket with multiple timelines on it so the the first ticket wins is is the simple answer so we have we have different uh it's going to be one work order so it'll be multiple requests and and the main thing that we get out of the request is the Lo location and when was it reported because the clock starts we have you know for priority 1 we have to respond within 2 hours we have to fix it within 24 so uh all of our different priorities have clocks on them so the first one wins and every request that comes in after that gets uh is in a child relationship to that parent first request but you can track that first request and subsequent one separately as far as timelines go uh the the separate ones are considered part of that first one okay so so so we don't we don't necessarily uh track them separately but the first one is going to be the hardest one to achieve because that the clock started first on that one so thank you awesome well wasn't Doug took time out of his day to show up and and chat with us I hope you guys enjoyed it got something out of it feel free to look him up anytime he's available 24 hours a day to hit him up on Twitter uh but I just want to do a nice big round of applause and thank you so much all right Mark