REDCAP
The Challenge
With the current state of worldwide events, it is imperative that Headquarters Pacific Air Forces (HQPACAF), which oversees all U.S. Air Force commands in the Pacific region, have data available to quickly assess the performance of the Wings, allowing them to effectively make decisions. The current method of manually extracting data from the legacy systems, inputting the data into Excel and PowerPoint to create briefing slides is a manual intensive time consuming process. A solution which quickly shows how well the maintenance community is performing its' primary mission by automating the creation of slides and analysis reporting was needed.
The Solution
REDCAP is a web-based decision support tool that puts mission essential data at the fingertips of those who need it. REDCAP allows for views of the performance data from the Squadron level up to the MAJCOM level, aggregating data as needed to produce the charts and reports for different view levels. The aggregation of data can also occur over different date ranges – either by month, by fiscal year or by a user selected date range, allowing trend analysis to be easily done without manually recalculating the performance rates each time.
Data collection is facilitated by requiring users at the Squadron level to enter measure data into a web page. The data is stored in a centralized database where REDCAP automatically calculates the performance rates from the measure data and additionally allows the attachment of a 7211 report. Once the data is submitted, all users will be able to request slides and view the attached report. Future phases will provide an interface to the legacy systems such as CAMS and EDW so that data can be automatically extracted from these systems, eliminating the manual input requirement.
REDCAP is a secure web based application developed by CTA Development, A Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. The application runs on a Windows 2000 Server web server and connects to a SQL Server 2000 database. Microsoft’s ASP.NET and ADO.NET were chosen as the primary development technologies because of their power and scalability.
REDCAP provides a greatly improved decision support system over the current manual “cut and paste” process. The benefits realized include man-hour savings gained by the automatic creation of the PowerPoint slides and the ability to easily produce different view levels over different date ranges. The database is centralized together with the related reports, making them available to all users and eliminating the requirement to continually email and store these files. Analysis reporting provides a tool for the analyst to determine the trends and why they are occurring.
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