When a guard or reserve unit is called in, seemingly minor personnel issues – such as outdated dental exams – can jeopardize the schedule. And because military personnel management systems often still run on disparate digital spreadsheets, finding troops who are not ready to deploy and notifying them in time to resolve the problem can quickly become a crisis of urgency .
That’s the problem that motivated veterans John New and Tim Wood to build a new management system that leaves all coordination to an AI algorithm, which spots personnel qualification or compliance issues and sends notifications to the service member to address the issue well before activation or to resolve activation. stake.
After successful limited employment within the Air Force Reserve, Wood and New say they hope other services will see the value of their product and adopt it more broadly.
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The two entrepreneurs, whose company co-founded by New, an Army infantry veteran, is called WerkMerk, say the workforce management system was inspired by an idea from a pilot, Master Sgt. Taylor Trani, then a technical sergeant in medical and dental administration with the New Jersey Air National Guard’s 177th Fighter Wing.
“[She] was fed up with the problem,” said Wood, who spent 22 years in the Navy SEALs. “And we just started working on it.”
Independent research confirmed how haphazard and inefficient the management of military personnel could be.
During a “deep dive” with the Air Force Reserve’s 932nd Airlift Wing from Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, New and Wood discovered that the wing’s unit implementation manager spent 30 hours of preparation time simply to ensure personnel were ready was for a practice weekend.
The unit’s medical and dental team, they said, worked for two full weeks to review medical records for the same weekend and verify that appointments and documentation were up to date.
“Well, after those two weeks of work, they had a no-show rate of about 30% just because there was no direct connection to the pilots, and their supervisor had no visibility into it, and so on,” said Wood, who directs the business development and product of DOD for WerkMerk.
That led to the launch of a pilot test of the system they now call AFLINX, which began by collecting medical and dental data for an entire unit, automatically sampling that data, and creating calendar invites for pilots, sent to their smartphones, for necessary appointments.
To protect privacy, they said, they made sure no medical or personal identifying information got out of the system. Airmen would receive a fairly generic message telling them to schedule an appointment.
“It amounted to having one additional agency in that department,” Wood said, “a savings…about 1,000 hours per year across the entire wing of all operations. [they’d have to] planning and putting butts in seats to get something done for an airman during a calendar year.
AFWERX, the Air Force’s innovation arm, saw the value of the system and began investing in it around the time the study began with the 177th, in 2020, they said.
In a statement, AFWERX spokesperson Matthew Clouse said WorkMerk has received five contracts to date totaling $3.9 million and a tactical funding increase contract for AFINX in August 2023, intended to help grow the software from prototype to viable project.
The 932nd, he said, “is exploring software solutions to improve planning, administration, management, readiness and communications processes. While Airmen are not currently using the software during the prototyping phase, they are providing input on use cases to ensure future acquisition decisions are based on operational needs and end-user requirements.”
While it can be difficult to generate excitement about workforce management innovations, they have been warmly received during pitch meetings for a number of components of the Air Force Reserve, including the 22nd, 10th and 4th Air Forces, and the Air Force Reserve . Command.
“It’s not about hitting targets on the horizon with a hypersonic missile, right. That’s why it’s kind of a slow response to people talking about it,” Wood said. “But we’ve had…nothing but praise and just the question, ‘When will it be ready?’ and ‘How much is it going to cost?’”
That cost, New said, was on the order of $100,000 per unit of 1,200 to 1,400 troops.
While WerkMerk has yet to expand into other services, a Navy officer who spoke to Military Times confirmed that managing reserve personnel was a collective headache.
Col. Brian Pate, G-3 operations officer for the Marine Corps Cyberspace Command, said the limited control commanders have over the schedules of their reservists, who can be spread over a large geographic region when not drilling, makes the challenge more difficult made.
“They may not be near a military medical treatment facility,” he said. “So when they come in, they may have very little time to complete a medical appointment or meet the readiness requirement.
“You have to do very detailed planning to make sure they are successful in carrying out the activity. I think having a management tool would help with that.”
