Education with Industry Tour
By Capt Emanuel Nunez, Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) Program Office

Education with Industry (EWI) is a 10-month Special Experience Exchange Duty (SPEED) program that provides the opportunity for United States Air Force officers, enlisted, and civilian students to work for commercial companies across the nation. The fellow’s ultimate objective is to develop a better understanding of industry and return to the Air Force to implement best practices at their follow-on assignments. The Air Force benefits greatly from this career broadening experience by developing our next generation of innovative Air Force leaders.

As an EWI fellow, I was selected to work at the Amazon.com Headquarters in Seattle, Washington and then report for my follow on assignment as an engineer on an ACAT IC program at Hill Air Force Base, Utah. I graduated from the EWI program in June 2017 and am well on my way to providing the Air Force important first-hand insight into industry’s best practices.

Amazon equipped me with the tools I needed to leverage and improve processes in my current organization. One best practice approach I helped implement at Amazon was to champion a process improvement event for my team, where we drafted a";flow-down" of our workplaces overall acquisition and sustainment processes to identify areas that needed improvement.

One major area of improvement identified by the team was the need to improve documentation of quality issues that directly impacted the warfighter. Amazon taught me the importance of managing data and using it to improve and monitor processes. At Amazon, I learned to build a multi-functional database to collect and organize data. Recently, I built a similar database for my program. This new database has increased visibility into program quality by enabling the team to prioritize and monitor issues. The tool is helping our team adapt our program’s technical baseline by driving a higher level of contractor accountability, improving upon previous years.

When my leadership learned about my experience with process improvement, they selected me to lead a Cartridge Activated/Propellant Actuated Devices integrated product team with the goal of improving their expired device temporary extension approval process. We mapped out the team’s processes and identified root causes and corrective actions that will prevent future grounded aircraft events.

While Amazon gave me the tools and the confidence to be able to lead these teams and bring about results in a short time, my impact as an EWI alumnus would not be possible without my leadership allowing me to carry out my objective. EWI is a team effort between industry and the Air Force and I am fortunate to have been part of it.

For more information on the EWI program, contact Capt. Katie Hansen, EWI program manager, at katherine.hansen@afit.edu