WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio -- Over the summer, a three-person team from the 655th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Wing went above and beyond their required job tasks and entered a virtual robot in to the Rise of the Digital Wingman competition, a Chief of Staff of the Air Force initiative.
The competition, held May 27 to Aug. 24, 2020, allowed teams from across the Air Force to enter digital “robots” with the goal of increasing efficiency and automation for Airmen’s day-to-day tasks.
This was the first year the competition was held and was the first of its kind. The event had 576 Airmen from 23 bases and 10 major commands participating in the campaign. The categories teams competed in were Best Overall Robot, Best Collaboration, Best Ops Impact, Best Business Impact and Best Impact to Morale.
Contest registration began in May and the final results were released in September.
The team from the 655th ISRW included Maj. Janea Spear, 655th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Group, and Master Sgt. Danielle Maze, 512th Intelligence Squadron. Lt. Col. Derek Spear, Maj. Spear’s husband and a doctoral student at the Air Force Institute of Technology, was also on the team. Their robot, ROBEXEC, won the category for Best Impact to Morale. It was designed to reduce workload from recurring administrative tasks, time required for recurring tasks, opportunity for error in executing recurring tasks, and ensure continuity of tasks in member’s absence.
“Everyone in the Air Force has recurring and tedious administrative tasks,” said Spear. “Our goal is to reduce the work load, time required, and errors experienced while completing those tasks when the one person who usually completes them is unavailable.”
The robot’s primary function is to compile slides from various locations, offices, or agencies and generate one Power Point presentation in a streamlined and standardized format. This technology can be used to save critical time when building presentations for commander’s briefings, staff meetings, daily updates and other recurring briefs.
Individuals can upload slides to a centralized location and ROBOEXEC will automatically pull them from the folder, standardize their formats, and compile them into a single presentation.
“With robotic process automation, repetitive tasks and trackers of information can be condensed and consolidated. This allows more time to focus on the mission and Airmen,” Maze said.
Maj. Spear said using the ROBOEXEC technology, automating these recurring processes could save almost 700 man-hours and nearly $35,000 per unit per year, which equates to almost four months of work per year.
“As the group’s exec, I am responsible for compiling slides from e-mail, shared drives, and Share Point into one slide show for the weekly staff meeting. With the time that I save using ROBOEXEC, I can focus on the issues of the day, answer emails, proof decorations and evaluations, and shift my focus to the needs of the commander and the units,” said Maj. Spear.
A secondary function of ROBOEXEC is to auto-complete various forms that Airmen are required to fill out on a regular basis such as in-and-out processing, account creation, and leave requests.
“The data required for these forms is already available in various databases and trackers,” Maze said. “Unfortunately, Airmen often don’t have access to the information, know where to find the information, or find it easier to simply re-fill in the data. When every member of a unit has multiple forms to fill out, the time spent quickly adds up.”
The program pulls data from various software suites in the Microsoft Office library. It then opens the files, pulls the necessary data out, and automatically fills in a PDF form using the data. The Form Filler program uses four unique software systems and can increase the speed of these forms being filled out by up to 60 percent.
Using this function of ROBOEXEC can save the Air Force up to 675 hours of work and $20,000 per unit per year.
“I am very excited about this program,” said Maze. “As a flight chief and training program manager, I have to track various members’ statuses, training completions, and accesses. This often requires collecting information from my members through a form and tracking their completion through a spreadsheet. This quickly becomes a frustrating and time-consuming task and I find myself saying ‘there has to be a better way.”
On his motivation to take part in this project, Lt. Col Spear said, “During my time as a detachment commander and executive officer, I saw many repetitive tasks that followed well defined rule set. By automating those tasks we can give time back to our Airmen. Time that can be spent honing their professional craft, working on their professional education, training, or time that can be given back to spend with their family and friends.”
In the coming months, the team plans to implement ROBOEXEC throughout the 655th ISRW for their everyday processes as well as begin to share ROBOEXEC with other units and organizations across the Air Force.
The 655th ISRW is an Independent Wing under the 10th Air Force, Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth, Texas, Headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, consisting of two Groups and 14 Associate Unit intelligence squadrons across seven operating locations, conducting 10 specialized missions. It is the most diverse ISR Wing in the United States Air Force, and the only ISR Wing in the USAF Reserve Command, providing every aspect of intelligence generation: acquisition, human, geographical, measurement and signal, targeting, cyber, support to special operations forces, linguistics and the Distributed Common Ground System