Case Studies — SERVICE AND OPERATIONAL MANAGEMENT

Perhaps the best feature of the RFS tool is that the client incurred no additional costs. The RFS tool was built with existing technologies and did not require the hiring of additional personnel to administrate the tool. The tool is supported by a single full time employee who took initiative to find a solution.  

The Marine Corps History Division (HD) serves an important purpose of documenting and preserving the history of the Marine Corps. The HD’s small staff’s herculean efforts to support a massive customer base presents many issues. The HD staff are over-encumbered with requests for support from external individuals and agencies to include the general public, and students and faculty of the Marine Corps University. The volume of Requests for services that HD receives over encumbers the staff and leads to slow processing times. The legacy system for handling requests for services was an organizational mailbox. However, without any functionality to support assignment of prioritization, filtering, or other organization mechanisms, requests for support were frequently missed, forgotten, or untimely responded to. 

Solution

A Hartwood employee sat in a meeting and overheard the problems plaguing the HD’s support to requests for services from its customer service base. By their own volition, the Hartwood employee began building the Request for Support (RFS) tool that would streamline and revolutionize how the HD supported its customers. Utilizing the Microsoft Office 365 Microsoft Office 365 features to include SharePoint Online, Power Apps, Power BI, and Power Automate, the RFS tool creates a visually stunning dashboard that dually serves the HD leadership as well as customers that require support. With features such as subject categorization, prioritization level assignment, sorting, filtering, and subject matter expert assignment, the RFS tool transformed a previously antiquated customer support process into a fully electronic and streamlined service.

Result

• The average completion time for processing RFSs has been reduced to 7 days. 
• An approve or regret (deny) function was introduced into the workflow so the supervisory archivist can maintain control of requests that populated RFS. This was primarily done to filter out requests that are spam, easily researched on the internet, or duplicates.
• The Power BI dashboard provides HD leadership with comprehensive metrics on total request volumes and processing times. It offers interactive drill-down capabilities by request type, requester category, and the archivist responsible for completion.
• The Power BI dashboard not only informs leadership’s decision making, but will be used to pull reports for their executive leadership to justify more funding and support.
• The tool was designed with a strong focus on user experience and ease of use. Comprehensive training ensured that even less tech-savvy staff could navigate and utilize the tool seamlessly thanks to its intuitive design.

Services

Perhaps the best feature of the RFS tool is that the client incurred no additional costs. The RFS tool was built with existing technologies and did not require the hiring of additional personnel to administrate the tool. The tool is supported by a single full time employee who provides system administration, technical maintenance, process optimization, user support, training and onboarding, data integrity and reporting, and continuous improvement. 

Conclusion

Hartwood staff identified an issue, developed a solution and jumped into action to solve the problem. Due to our staff’s efforts, the HD is more efficient, responsive, and accurate in its request for services than ever before. 

Challenge

Air Force Training and Education Command (AETC) at Joint Base San Antonio is home to Basic Military Training (BMT), where every enlisted Airman begins their Air Force career. As part of this mission, each trainee must be issued multiple uniforms that are properly fitted and altered to meet Air Force standards of precision and professionalism.  

This mission is exceptionally complex. The sheer volume of trainees, combined with extremely compressed timelines for issuing and altering uniforms, placed immense strain on the alterations shop. Compounding the challenge, the shop relied on antiquated, primarily paper-based processes to assign uniforms, mark alterations, and track items throughout the alterations lifecycle. These manual processes resulted in frequent clerical errors, lost or misplaced paperwork, production delays, and unfulfilled orders, creating operational risk and inefficiency.  

Solution

Hartwood immediately embedded with the alterations operation to observe workflows and conduct detailed process mapping and analysis. Key bottlenecks, inconsistencies, and failure points were quickly identified and documented.  

Based on these findings, Hartwood partnered with its development team to fundamentally modernize the alterations process by designing and delivering a custom application called TRIMS. TRIMS digitized the entire uniform alterations lifecycle, allowing uniform orders to be placed electronically, tracked in real time, and fully accounted for at the individual Airman and item level. This eliminated reliance on paper, reduced errors, and introduced end-to-end visibility across the operation.

Results

The operational improvements delivered by TRIMS were transformative. Alterations leadership gained real-time visibility into uniform status and workload, enabling proactive management rather than reactive problem-solving. The data captured within TRIMS allowed leaders to forecast material and equipment shortfalls, identify process inefficiencies, and plan resources more effectively. Most importantly, leadership was empowered with reliable, actionable data to make informed, data-driven decisions that improved throughput and mission performance.  

Services

To sustain and continuously improve the TRIMS platform, Hartwood maintains a dedicated team of skilled application developers. This team works closely with the client to introduce enhancements, address evolving requirements, and ensure the tool continues to deliver operational value over time.  

Conclusion

With a small, focused team of analysts and developers, Hartwood delivered outsized impact to the AETC alterations shop. By modernizing business processes and injecting purpose-built technology and data capture capabilities, Hartwood revolutionized how uniforms are altered, tracked, and managed, significantly enhancing operational capacity and supporting AETC’s critical training mission.