Babson professor Dennis F.S. Mathaisel’s “Sustaining the Military Enterprise: An Architecture for a Lean Transformation” (Auerbach Publications) describes a Lean Enterprise Architecture (LEA) strategy to transform maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) enterprises in the defense industry.
The U.S. government mandates that all Department of Defense logistic-wide initiatives adopt commercially proven practices and strategies to undergo MRO transformations. Reasons for the drastic order include aging weapons systems, an aging workforce, limited financial resources, and new technologies, just to name a few. In order to execute this radical directive, transformation offices have been established to implement these new strategies. However, these offices have no condensed, user-oriented context to refer to when implementing these new strategies.
Dr. Mathaisel’s book incorporates the management and technical skills necessary to design and implement cost effective, integrated, sustainment networks and agile organizational structures. The application of LEA to military sustainment initiatives will lead to less resource intensive and organizationally disruptive practices than seen in traditional LEA transformation methods.
The book is organized into six chapters which focus on three major subject categories: Management Techniques for Transforming the Military Sustainment Enterprise; Improving the Enterprise: Process Improvement Initiatives and Benchmarking Best Practices; and Activities for Enterprise Transformation. The author also includes an assessment and description of the current military sustainment system and a guide to the LEA transformation. Through an intensive examination of new technologies, tools, and strategies, the author provides a means for military sustainment initiatives to achieve a successful transformation.
The unique reference:
• Analyzes the military sustainment enterprise and provides the strategies, principles, and technologies necessary to transform and sustain the military and the weapon systems it develops and utilizes.
• Provides the tools that management, product development, and operational support teams need to consider in the design, development, operation, and improvement of their products.
• Explains how process improvement initiatives and best-practices minimize waste while maximizing the usefulness of each process.
• Provides the necessary documents and tools on an accompanying CD to guide the enterprise through the LEA transformation activities.
About the author:
Dennis F.X. Mathaisel is professor of Management Science at Babson College. He was a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founder and president of a computer software firm that developed systems for airline scheduling and resource allocation, and he was a branch manager for Operations Research at the McDonnell Douglas Corporation.
Dr. Mathaisel's teaching interests are in the fields of operations research, quantitative methods, computer science, physics, and air transport operations. His current research interests focus on the sustainability of complex and aging systems and lean manufacturing. Dr. Mathaisel was the MIT co-lead of the Sustainment Operations Team for the Lean Sustainment Initiative for the U.S. Air Force. He has had research assignments with NASA, the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Department of Transportation (Office of the Secretary), Federal Aviation Administration, Pratt & Whitney Aircraft, Flying Tiger Line, Pan American World Airways, Hughes Air West, Olympic Airways, Federal Express, Iberia Airlines, Northwest Airlines, USAir, Continental, Garuda Indonesia, Trans World Airlines, and others. This experience has covered a range of topics including military logistics sustainability, lean enterprise sustainability, decision support systems, vehicle maintenance and routing, equipment acquisition, logistics, scheduling, fleet and route planning, and transport systems analysis and engineering.
Dr. Mathaisel's current publications focus on enterprise sustainment. His publications appear in Benchmarking an International Journal, Acquisition Review Quarterly, International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, International Journal of Educational Management, Transportation Science, Journal of Combinatorial Optimization, Computers & Operations Research, Journal of Research on Computing in Education, Journal of Systems and Software, Society of Automotive Engineers, American Institute of Aeronautics & Astronautics, and the Decision Sciences Institute Proceedings.
He was elected as a Full Member of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS). He is also a member of the Decision Sciences Institute (DSI), The Airline Group of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (AGIFORS), the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), the American Institute of Aeronautics & Astronautics (AIAA) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He is a private pilot and an owner of a Cessna 182 aircraft based at Hanscom AFB, Massachusetts.
Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., is recognized internationally as a leader in entrepreneurial management education. Babson grants BS degrees through its innovative undergraduate program, and grants MBA and custom MS and MBA degrees through the F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College. Babson Executive Education offers executive development programs to experienced managers worldwide. For information, visit http://www.babson.edu.
