Annual summit on Unique Identification.

On Nov. 17, 2004, Michael Wynne, acting undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, kicked off the first annual summit on Unique Identification and Radio Frequency Identification. The summit provided a forum for program managers, industry partners, and the military services to discuss challenges, benefits, and lessons learned.

Wynne began the discussion with a policy update and an implementation timeline for UID. His vision is for a fully integrated situational knowledge of people, places, and items by 2010. For example, a quick computer search of comprehensive registries could yield a listing of items such as spare parts or weaponry at nearby bases, along with the location of those bases and a listing of troops available there. Thus, both people and items can be identified and located for rapid deployment response.

Wynne's remarks were followed by presentations from the Navy, Army, and Air Force about their overarching concepts of operations specific to UID for items. Each Service is embracing UID as an agent of change that will increase its logistics efficiency. Although adoption is initially focused on new acquisitions, all the Services are using maintenance as a trigger for legacy item marking and are making a point of ensuring that all automated information systems acquired in the future are designed to exploit the possible applications of UID.

The CH-47 is the Army's pilot program, and it is rapidly implementing and utilizing UID in daily operations. Having gone beyond the requirements of only marking items and sub-assemblies valued at over $5,000, the CH-47 program has targeted 1,175 separate parts for marking. Legacy parts are being marked in the field during scheduled and unscheduled maintenance, and over 780 parts have already been marked in this manner. Col. Tim Crosby, presenter for the CH-47 program, stressed that the focus of UID must not be on marking parts, but rather on developing intelligent data, and this will only be accomplished once the registry is fully operational.

Navy also presented a concept of operations that went beyond the DoD requirements. Navy considers UID a strategic imperative that is critical in the transformation to a proactive, predictive fleet-readiness culture. Navy faces challenges in implementation standardization and UID integration but is forging ahead with its F/A-18 program. Its goal is to begin legacy marking by October of 2005. with full UID compliance by October of 2010.

The Air Force is using the C-17 as its model program and is in the process of finalizing its implementation plan. Since May of 2004, all C-17s have had their landing gear marked during retrofitting, and 100 percent of the drawings for support equipment have been updated to include Unique Item Identifiers (UIIs).

Air Force Col. Greg Sparks, speaking about his experience with the C-17 program, said that serialized item management enhanced by UID has already begun to show its potential. It recently became necessary to locate all aircraft containing a part from a specific lot. The part was located under the dashboard, and without a listing of marked parts, it would have been necessary to disassemble the entire dashboard to view the part and its lot number. Because the parts had been catalogued, the registry could be scanned for all parts from that lot. The corresponding aircraft were identified, and it was possible to ground only the affected aircraft instead of the whole fleet.

Following the presentations, LeAntha Sumpter, program manager for UID, provided a roadmap of the next steps for UID, including developing a policy for the marking of legacy items, marking items with virtual UIIs and incorporating them into the registry, and integrating UII with real property UIDs.