TOP STORY >>Personnel Center streamlines retirement actions

RANDOLPH AIR FORCE BASE, Texas — By consolidating a portion of the workload of 84 military personnel flights into one service center, personnel officials have streamlined the retirement process.

Now newly-retired Air Force members and retired members seeking or needing corrections to their Certificate of Release or Discharge from Active Duty, commonly referred to as a DD Form 214, will get action in record time.

“We stood up the infrastructure to complete 214s for all retiring members, as well as handle corrections, in the new vMPF application on the AFPC website.” said Tim Goad, Chief of the Retirement and Separations Documentation Branch at AFPC. “The key was the ’web’ application – we now have a program that can handle the electronic traffic,” said Mr. Goad.

Retirees can now review their 214s on line and provide feedback to AFPC. In the past, each base military personnel flight handled creation of 214s for retiring personnel. That work is now done in one office located at AFPC. The most immediate improvements became evident in DD Form 214 corrections.

“Retiring members can sit at home, log in, view their 214s and correspond directly with AFPC,” said Mr. Goad. “They don’t need an appointment any longer, no trip to the base; they can log in anytime, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

The website is: http://ask.afpc.randolph.af.mil. Click on vMPF Self-Service Applications. Retirees can also call toll free to 1-800-616-3775, and select options 1, 1, 2. This phone line is manned 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Not surprisingly, this new process developed from a Lean event, part of the Air Force Smart Operations 21 program. Using AFSO 21, the Air Force initiative that challenges people to look at ways to accomplish the Air Force mission, the process became more effective and efficient while maintaining quality standards.\

In August 2006, the Directorate of Personal Program Management convened this DD Form 214 Correction Rapid Improvement Event. The team, lead by Mr. Goad and Tech. Sgt. Bryan Cyr, focused on mapping the steps involved in correcting a 214 from the time it is received from the Board of Corrections of Military Records until it is returned to the BCMR.

The team found they could make significant improvements; a 33 percent reduction in touch time, a 91 percent reduction in handoffs and a 40 percent reduction in the number of steps to process a DD Form 214 correction.