Pope changes discharge process Published Dec. 7, 2006 By 1st Lt. Lisa Ferguson 43rd Airlift Wing Public Affairs POPE AIR FORCE BASE, N.C. -- Smart Operations 21 is changing the way the Air Force does business, and it's changing the way Pope discharges Airmen. "When we did the (rapid improvement event) in August, we mapped out the whole process from cradle to grave and it was 66 days," said Master Sgt. Tywanna Frazier, noncommissioned officer in charge of general law at the 43rd Airlift Wing legal office. According to Sergeant Frazier, 22 of those 66 days was travel time, which is time to carry the files between the legal office, the first sergeant and other squadron officials. "We had to find a way to cut the travel time down," she said. "It was so time consuming and frustrating for the squadron and the legal office. We definitely had to find a way to work these smarter, and not harder." The RIE team decided the easiest way to solve the travel time problem was to create a shared drive to save all the documents to that all necessary officials in the squadrons and the legal office had access to. "It saved nearly 21 days of travel time," Sergeant Frazier said. Then the team decided to take it one step further. In the old process, one discharge clerk at the legal office took care of all the discharge paperwork for every Airman on base. The team thought it would make more sense to give the process back to the squadrons. "We wanted to give the process back to the squadron," Sergeant Frazier said. "We could train the discharge clerks, give them access to the shared drive and give the squadrons ownership of the process. It saves on travel time and solves the bottleneck that was occurring in the legal office." In the new process, the legal office only sees the packages when they are ready to go before the wing commander. Nov. 6-8, the legal office held a mass training for squadron discharge clerks. "Capt. Dominic Angiollo, chief of adverse actions for the 43rd Airlift Wing legal office, led the three-day training class, and we provided them with continuity books with checklists, AFIs and sample letters of the most common administrative discharges that the legal office sees," Sergeant Frazier said. Staff Sgt. Angel McCoy was the base discharge clerk for three years, and understood better than anyone else about the bottleneck occurring at the legal office with administrative discharges. She now works in the 43rd Maintenance Squadron, which was the test unit for the new process. "Being here in the unit will help the time crunch," Sergeant McCoy said. "We do process them faster, because we work two or three at a time, instead of 10 or 15 a month. "It's a 48-hour turnaround, where as before with three packages, it would take me a week to get them through. "Once each unit starts doing it, legal can push (the paperwork) out faster. According to Sergeant McCoy, force shaping has only increased the legal office's bottleneck, and each unit preparing packages will speed up the process.