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Pawlikowski gets strategic at Robins Commander’s Call

  • Published
  • By Geoff Janes
  • 78th Air Base Wing Public Affairs

Gen. Ellen M. Pawlikowski, Air Force Materiel Command commander, provided Team Robins with an update on command strategies during a commander’s call at the Museum of Aviation Century of Flight Hangar Jan. 20.

The AFMC Strategic Plan, released in 2016, establishes four goals: Increasing AFMC’s agility in order to best support the Air Force enterprise; Bolstering trust and confidence of those we serve; Driving cost effectiveness into the capabilities we provide; and, Recruiting, developing and retaining a diverse, high-performing and resilient team.

The general said she was also visiting Robins to receive briefings from base leadership about the work being done here.

“I’m reviewing metrics to have the visibility, to understand where I can help … so that I can be supportive of making sure we’re getting resources that are needed.”

While discussing increasing AFMC’s agility to support the Air Force enterprise, she drove home efficiency. In order to improve it, Pawlikowski said the headquarters asked AFMC units what the barriers were to getting work done. Headquarters received 164 inputs and 81 of them were approved as actionable. Fifty-four of them have been implemented.

“Most of them focused on additional layers of review,” she said. “If I were to capture in one sentence what those 81 barriers were, they boil down to empowering our workforce.”

She said that units would start seeing changes that allowed squadron-level decision making versus headquarters-level approval. 

In discussing increasing agility in materiel management, Pawlikowski said it was all about how the materiel enterprise is managed. She said there had been some successes in the Nuclear Weapons Center, and those concepts would be transferred to other centers.

The commander also said AFMC had identified a set of command-wide commitments.

“I went to all the other MAJCOM commanders, and I said, ‘We do a lot of things for you, and I want to make sure that when we say we’re going to do something for you, we meet our commitment,’” she said.

The command highlighted 40 commitments and tracked them to see if they were meeting them on time. A 95 percent on-time goal was set, 81 percent was achieved.

The commander also highlighted the importance of improving customer satisfaction.

“The first thing you have to understand is what your customer thinks about you,” she said.

When it came to cost savings and avoidance, Pawlikowski said the progress reflected in this area pleased her most.

“We’ve been squeezing this turnip for quite a while,” she said, “but you continue trying to drive down costs every day.”

There were three objectives for recruiting, developing and retaining a diverse, high-performing and resilient team.

“The first one was to expand and synchronize our recruitment efforts,” Pawlikowski said. “We’ve made good progress, that’s why we were able to hire so many folks. But this one is still very much a work in progress.”

The second objective was to decrease ancillary training to return four hours to the workforce, and the third was retention of Airmen and their families.

“We do have some career fields where retention is an issue,” she said. “I’m taking a personal (interest) because one of those areas is acquisition program managers.”

Pawlikowski also called Team Robins member Kevin Johnson to the stage where she coined him for his exceptional work as a team leader for the C-130 Air Force Special Operations Command Acceleration Plan worked by the 560th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron.