Engineering Edge: September 2013

THE ENGINEERING EDGE

EDGEWOOD CHEMICAL BIOLOGICAL CENTER

Volume 5, Issue 9

September 2013

ECBC Engineering Helps Lead the Way in Military Respiration Protection page 4-6

Engineering Strategy Paves Way for Improved Customer Service

Employee Spotlight: Courtney Young page 8

page 7

To access the electronic version of this newsletter, visit: http://www.ecbc.army.mil/news/ENG/ APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE

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2 | EDGEWOOD CHEMICAL BIOLOGICAL CENTER

INSIDE THIS MONTH’S ISSUE: pg.4-6|ECBC Engineering Helps Lead the Way in Military Respiration Protection pg.7| Engineering Strategy Paves Way for Improved Customer Service pg.8| Employee Spotlight: Courtney Young

Sharepoint: Setting Up Alerts SharePoint can be configured to send you an email or an SMS text message whenever things are changed on either a specific item in a library, or if anything in a library as a whole changes. This is useful since you won’t then have to go back and manually check each SharePoint site for changes. You can set up alerts using the Alert Me button in the Ribbon on any given SharePoint content area.

Clicking it brings up the New Alert window, where you add: a title to the alert, the delivery method (either an email to a specified address or a phone number for an SMS text message), the context of the alert (whether an alert is sent for any change at all, or only if new items are added, if existing items are modified, or if items are deleted), the scope of an alert (if anything changes, if a document changes, if a document you created or last modified changes), and how quickly the alert is sent after a change (you can set up an immediate alert, a daily summary, or a weekly summary, and you can customize the time for this). The alert then comes directly to you.

Ask a Tech Tip: Extension Cords Mike Kauzlarich, of the Pyrotechnics and Explosives Branch, reveals how the techniques and lessons learned in labs can help you solve your household problems. Submit a question to him at usarmy.APG.ecbc.mbx.engineering-directorate@mail.mil.

This newsletter was published through the Balanced Scorecard.

For article suggestions, questions or comments please contact Ed Bowen at edward.c.bowen8.civ@mail.mil

I recently had a friend ask me to look at a power saw he had purchased. It was his second saw in as many weeks, and he was concerned that the saw wasn’t up to the workload he was putting it through. There was nothing wrong with his saw.

The truth was that the extension cord he was using wasn’t up to the workload. He was using a lighter gauge extension cord and burned up his saw when it could not pull enough electricity through the smaller wires of the light gauge cord.

Make sure your extension cords are sized appropriately for the work and are of good quality. On each extension cord there will be an embossed number indicating the gauge of wire used in the cord (e.g. 12, 14, 16, etc.). The smaller the number, the heavier the gauge of the wire is. As a general rule of thumb, the gauge of your extension cord should be heavier than the gauge of the cord on your tool or appliance.

Moreover, if you’re running a long cord to a device, you will need an even heavier gauge cord to account for the voltage lost over the distance of the cord.

It’s a matter of safety. Use a quality cord with a thicker gauge wire than the device you are using. It will save your equipment and prevent the cord from overheating and potentially catching fire.

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THE ENGINEERING EDGE |September 2013| 3

Awareness: National Preparedness Month

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reparedness is a year round activity. However, September is the month for recognizing national preparedness. The overall goal is to engage the public to make preparedness a part of their daily lives and just not for one single month. National Preparedness Month (NPM) is geared towards building awareness and encouraging Americans to take steps to prepare for emergencies in their homes, schools, organizations, businesses, and places of worship. NPM is managed and sponsored by FEMA’s Ready Campaign. The Ready Campaign works closely with Citizen Corps and National Preparedness Community (NPC) members to increase emergency preparedness awareness and activities across the nation.

Emergencies can happen unexpectedly in any community at any time. According to the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) and the National Weather Service (NWS) over the last 50 years there has been a significant increase in tornado outbreaks, river floods and flash floods, historic earthquakes, hurricanes, and even water main breaks and power outages in U.S. cities, affecting millions of people for days at a time.

Police, fire and rescue may not always be able to reach you quickly in an emergency or disaster. The most important step you can take in helping your local responders is being able to take care of yourself and those in your care; the more people who are prepared, the quicker the community will recover.

This September, please prepare and plan in the event you must go for three days without electricity, water service, access to a supermarket, or local services for several days. Just follow these four steps:

STAY INFORMED

Information is available from federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial resources. Access Ready.gov to learn what to do before, during, and after an emergency.

MAKE A PLAN

Discuss, agree on, and document an emergency plan with those in your care. For sample plans, see Ready.gov. Work together with neighbors, colleagues, and others to build community resilience.

BUILD A KIT

Keep enough emergency supplies - water, nonperishable food, first aid, prescriptions, flashlight, and battery-powered radio on hand - for you and those in your care.

GET INVOLVED

There are many ways to get involved especially before a disaster occurs. The whole community can participate in programs and activities to make their families, homes and places of worship safer from risks and threats. Community leaders agree that the formula for ensuring a safer homeland consists of volunteers, a trained and informed public, and increased support of emergency response agencies during disasters.

By taking a few simple actions, you can make your family safer. Consider planning a Ready Kids event in your community to encourage families to get prepared with their children. Here are a handful of suggestions offered by FEMA: • Volunteer to present preparedness information in your child’s class or in PTO/PTA meetings.

• Invite officials from your local Office of Emergency Management, Citizen Corps Council, or first responder teams to speak at schools or youth events.

• Use local emergency management resources to learn more about preparedness in your community.

• Contact your local emergency management agency to get essential information on specific hazards to your

area, local plans for shelter and evacuation, ways to get information before and during an emergency, and how to sign up for emergency alerts if they are available Contact your local firehouse and ask for a tour and information about preparedness.

• Get involved with your local American Red Cross Chapter or train with a Community Emergency Response Team (CERT).

For more information, check out Ready.gov and follow Twitter handle @Readygov.

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JSGPM 4 | EDGEWOOD CHEMICAL BIOLOGICAL CENTER

The idea was to make it as simple as possible for the troops to use the mask. We did a lot of long hours in the test chamber and working with the Warfighters to get it right. – Bill Fritch, the Product Manager for the JSGPM

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THE ENGINEERING EDGE |September 2013| 5

ECBC Engineering Helps Lead the Way in Military Respiration Protection

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s the Army begins to field the new M50 Joint Service General Purpose Mask (JSGPM), ECBC Engineering and the Joint Project Manager for Individual Protection (JPM-IP) cap a more than decade long effort to provide the Warfighter with stateof-the-art respiratory protection against known chemical and biological agents and radioactive particles.

The new mask provides the Warfighter with improvements in nearly every single category over the older generations of masks: comfort, visibility, hydration, you name it.

– Bill Fritch

Having completed fielding the system with the Marine Corps, Air Force, and Navy, the Army is now fielding the mask to its troops stationed in strategically critical South Korea with other commands to follow. Unlike previous generations of protective masks that were designed specifically for each Service, the JSGPM was designed as a joint solution from the outset, allowing for streamlined implementation by the Services and offering an improved operational capability to the Warfighter.

Fielding of the JSGPM by the Army represents a culmination of over 15 years of work by the JSGPM team and Bill Fritch, the Product Manager for the JSGPM. “I’ve been working on the project from the very beginning after spending my early career working to develop previous generations of respiratory filtration systems,” said Fritch. Fritch, an ECBC Engineering chemical engineer, has spent his entire 31-year career working at ECBC in respiratory filtration systems. “I worked on the M40 gas mask and did a lot of testing with that system, gaining a lot of experience from user input on respiratory protection, and when R&T began work on the next generation mask, I was matrixed over there to help begin developing what became the JSGPM,” said Fritch.

The JSGPM represents a significant improvement over legacy mask systems. “The new mask provides the Warfighter with improvements in nearly every single category over the older generations of masks: comfort, visibility, hydration, you name it,” said Fritch. Compared to previous models, the JSGPM offers a more ergonomic design that increases optical clarity, user comfort, and ease of use and maintenance in high stress and austere environments. The mask’s lower profile also offers the Warfighter a much improved ability to use and operate various weapons and military equipment while wearing the system.

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ECBC ENGINEERING HELPS LEAD THE WAY IN MILITARY RESPIRATION PROTECTION CONTINUED FROM PAGE 5

There are no formal plans to develop a new mask right now, and I expect this system to be out there for a long time.

– Bill Fritch

With over 800,000 masks fielded thus far, feedback from Warfighters in theater has been very positive. “The Warfighters really like it,” said Fritch.

tested, trained, and deployed with the mask since 2001 has been critical to its success, and has helped make it one of the most heavily-tested pieces of Individual Protective Equipment ever developed by the Department of Defense.

With the successful fielding of the JSGPM, ECBC has contributed to an outstanding success in the defense acquisition process, giving U.S. Warfighters a piece of protective equipment that stands head and shoulders above competing designs. “There are no formal plans to develop a new mask right now, and I expect this system to be out there for a long time,” said Fritch.

“And we are really focused on making sure that the product gets better over time, making small improvements where we can.” The feedback from the Warfighters that have

U.S. Marines undergo initial user training with the JSGPM development team APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE

THE ENGINEERING EDGE | September 2013| 7

Engineering Strategy Paves Way for Improved Customer Service

that could be used across the Directorate,” said Mihok, a Chemical Engineer with the Engineering Support Division.

“The idea was that we wanted to pick an initiative that wouldn’t take us five years to complete. We wanted something where we could produce a concrete product that people could hold and see within a relatively short time frame.”

So, with nothing more than a list of overarching goals, Mihok, Pan, and Labonte went to work. “Our guidance was essentially: ‘Take this and run with it’,” said Mihok. “In a lot of ways it was really refreshing to be able to work on a project like this.”

Drawing on their own experiences working with various customers and pulling feedback from branch chiefs across the Engineering Directorate, Mihok, Pan, and Labonte came together to produce the new Customer Service Toolkit. “Amee, Christine, and I just sat down and wrote our thoughts about what should Amanda Mihok and Christine Pan present the Customer Service Toolkit at the June be done. We then got guidance from the branch Strategic Management Meeting. chiefs to see what they thought would work, what they thought wouldn’t work, and from there we were Since the Engineering Balanced Scorecard (BSC) strategy able to come up with the toolkit,” said Mihok. development process began in 2005, Engineering Directorate staff has remained engaged because the strategy The Customer Service Toolkit provides members of the itself is relevant and accessible. The structure of the strategy Directorate with a set of tools for providing timely and responsive calls for continuous efforts to educate individuals about customer service and feedback. It is designed to establish a strategic initiatives and these initiatives seek to improve daily flexible set of guidelines for interacting with customers and to operations for the workforce — including a specific initiative provide the workforce with some fundamental tools for recording to improve customer service. project data to offer customers tailored reports on each project.

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n May 2012, the Engineering Directorate Division Chief’s Roundtable formally activated planning and implementation against six new organizational strategic initiatives as a part of the Directorate’s Balanced Scorecard strategic planning process. The initiatives were a direct output of a Directorate-wide SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Opportunities, Weaknesses and Threats) done in July 2012 and address the most critical challenges of the organization and the overarching constrained fiscal climate across the Department of Defense (DoD). Each initiative is championed by at least two Engineering Division Chiefs to guide the planning and actionable next steps of implementing against each strategic focus area. Initiatives include the development of a Directorate-wide Business Development Plan, a Customer Service Strategy, a Human Capital Strategy, a Strategic Communications Plan, a Smart Growth Infrastructure Plan, and a Knowledge Management Program.

The toolkit is not mandatory, and each branch has the option to use it as they see fit. “The whole idea was that this could be used on an ‘as needed’ basis and that each branch could tailor it to each customer,” said Mihok.

Some of the topics covered in the toolkit are: Proposed Steps for Communication with Customers, Proposed Communication Timeline, How to Measure Customer Satisfaction, and Managing Dissatisfied Customers. The toolkit also includes several example documents of various reports that employees can provide to their customers. These include examples of a Line Item Expenditure Record, a Monthly Expenditure Report, a Quarterly Project Update Report, and a sample Customer Satisfaction Survey.

– Amanda Mihok, a chemical engineer with the Engineering Support Division

After several months of development, and initial reviews held

by Lake and the Customer Service initiative team, Mihok and Pan formally introduced the new Customer Service Toolkit to the directorate at the June Engineering Strategic Management Meeting. “The reaction was more positive than I ever could have expected,” said Mihok. “A lot of people were coming up to us afterwards asking for copies.”

Following the activation of these initiatives, Bill Lake, Engineering Support Division Chief and assigned co-owner with Engineering Support Division Chief Jorge Christian of the Customer Service initiative, came to three of his division personnel – Amanda Mihok, Christine Pan, and Amee Labonte - with an unusual request. “He wanted us to come up with a tool for implementing good customer service practices

The Customer Service Toolkit is posted on the Engineering Directorate SharePoint site at https://cbconnect.apgea.army. mil/ENG/default.aspx.

Our guidance was essentially: Take this and run with it.

With such positive initial feedback, Mihok is looking forward to hearing the workforce’s opinion as people start using the toolkit in their interactions with their customers. “I’m interested to see what we can do to make the toolkit better and how the customers respond to it.”

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Employee Spotlight: Courtney Young In this month’s Engineering Edge Employee Spotlight, we talked to Courtney Young, matrixed ECBC Engineering employee to the DR-SKO program.

How did you get started at ECBC? I started off as a biomedical engineering major in college. As I was completing my degree, I was recruited out of school as a matrixed employee with the Engineering Directorate working on the Dismounted Reconnaissance Sets, Kits, and Outfits (DR-SKO) program.

What is your role on the DR-SKO program?

I focus on reliability testing for the various DR-SKO program systems. Each service has their own variant of the DR-SKO system, and each system is a kit comprised of multiple detection subsystems. My job is to make sure that each system meets the overall reliability target of 80 percent. I also work a lot with the logistics and fielding of the system. This means that I have to work with each of the different services to get their feedback on the system and to help them conduct fielding and training for their particular variant.

What has it been like working with so many different customers with different wants and needs?

It’s been very interesting. Each customer wants things done

a very particular way, and they each have different types of end users. This makes the feedback very diverse but also very interesting, and I have enjoyed working with all the different clients. We’ve worked closely with operational units to get end user feedback, which is nice because it allows us to get the face-to-face time with the Warfighters.

What skills have you needed to use on this project that you would not have expected?

I’ve found that my communications skills have been the most important for working with our customers to successfully field the system. You have to be able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes sometimes to understand the feedback that they are providing. It’s also required a lot of flexibility because of the very diverse needs of each of the services.

With Full Rate Production scheduled for March, how does it feel to be wrapping up work on this project, and what’s next for you?

It’s been amazing to see the program go from beginning to end, and I’ve enjoyed working with our team. I don’t know what’s next for me right now. I’ve been involved with the logistics for DRSKO, so I may stay with the program doing that, or I may move to a new program. Either way, I’m excited to see where I end up.

Congratulations to all of our recent Engineering Directorate Award Winners!

SES Notes/Letter of Appreciation Joint Intelligence Center Central and Letter w/coin WMD Ballistic Missiles, Energy, Environmental Security Branch

Award Recognition

• Greg Peterson** • Rick Cox** • David Tevault** • Bill Fritch • Wayne Gulian • Jorge Christian 10 Years • Amanda L. Yocum • Daniel L. Lumpkins • William L. Wilson • Jason C. Walter • Richard D. Wallace III • Robert J. Pazda • Mark A. Ciampaglio • Brendon L. Clingensmith • Richard J. Kreis 25 Years • Phyllis A. Brown

30 Years • Shirl J. Dorsey Recognized • Doug Celmer – Achievement Medal for Civilian Service Coin • Rick Moore • Lester Hitch • Rashad Scott • Brad Ruprecht SES Note • Sheri Jeric, James Hendershot, Mark Blackiston • Glenn Wetherell • Khoa Nguyen, Kyle Phillips Patents • James Genovese, Robin Matthews (1) • James Genovese (4)

** Greg Peterson, Rick Cox and David Tevault are members of the R&T Directorate, sharing the award with members of the Engineering Directorate.

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