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•Case Study: Whiteman Airforce Base Keeps The B-2 Bomber In The Air And Tooling In Their Shop

By WinWare

The job of keeping the Air Force's squadron of B-2 bombers in flying condition falls to the maintenance crew at Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri. It's a job that impacts our nation's security, and it can't be done without tools. The Air Force has 21 of the multi-role heavy bombers, and each one cost about $1.3 billion to build. Keeping up with them takes about 10,000 tools and 2,000 or so maintenance manuals.

With all that money on the line, the ability to track those tools and other equipment needed to be easy and accurate. It was neither. So Whiteman officials turned to the CribMaster Inventory Management System. CribMaster, which uses bar coding and radio-frequency scanners to track where tools are and who's using them, has eliminated the handwritten notes that were being used to check out tools to maintenance crew in the 21 hangars.

Sgt. Bob Goddard, the consolidated tool kits custodian who's in charge of keeping track of tools used on the B- 2, explained that the Air Force unit used to use a chip system to show where the tools were. Whenever a tool was taken from a toolcrib, it was replaced by a round piece of metal that provided information about where the tool was and for what it was being used. The information was all listed by hand – often incomplete, in scraggly writing, or not filled out at all – on about 1,000 paper receipts per shift.

Click Here To Download:
•Case Study: Whiteman Airforce Base Keeps The B-2 Bomber In The Air And Tooling In Their Shop