When a Guard or Reserve unit gets called up to deploy, seemingly small personnel issues — like out-of-date dental exams — can throw planning into jeopardy. And with military personnel management systems often still run on disparate digital spreadsheets, finding troops who aren’t deployment-ready and notifying them in time to fix the problem can quickly become a crisis of urgency.
That’s the problem that motivated veterans John New and Tim Wood to build a new management system that leaves all the coordination to an AI algorithm, which spots personnel qualification or compliance issues and fires off notifications to the service member to fix the problem well before activation or deployment.
After successful limited employment within the Air Force Reserve, Wood and New say they hope other services will see the value in their product and adopt it more broadly.
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The two entrepreneurs, whose company, co-founded by New, an Army infantry veteran, is called WerkMerk, say the personnel management system was inspired by an idea from an airman, Master Sgt. Taylor Trani, then a technical sergeant in medical and dental administration at the New Jersey Air National Guard’s 177th Fighter Wing.
“[She] was sick and tired of the problem,” said Wood, who spent 22 years in the Navy SEALs. “And we just ran with it.”
Independent research confirmed how haphazard and inefficient military personnel management could be.
During one “deep dive” with the Air Force Reserve’s 932nd Airlift Wing out of Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, New and Wood found the wing’s unit deployment manager spent 30 hours of prep time simply to ensure personnel were ready for a drill weekend.
The unit’s medical and dental team, they said, worked for two full weeks to review medical records for the same weekend and verify appointments and documentation were up to date.
“Well, after that two weeks of work, they had approximately a 30% no-show rate, just because there was no connectivity directly with the airmen, and their supervisor had no visibility on it, and so on,” said Wood, who directs DOD business development and product for WerkMerk.
That spurred the launch of a pilot test of the system they’re now calling AFLINX, which began by collating medical and dental data for a full unit, automatically sampling that data and creating calendar invites for airmen, sent to their smartphones, for needed appointments.
To protect privacy, they said, they made sure no medical or personal identification information traveled out of the system — airmen would receive a fairly generic message telling them they had an appointment to schedule.
“It was the equivalent of having one extra body in that department,” Wood said, “saving them … approximately 1,000 hours a year throughout the whole wing of all the activities [they’d have to] schedule and put butts in seats to get something done for an airman during a calendar year.”
AFWERX, the Air Force’s innovation arm, saw the value in the system and began investing it around the time that research with the 177th began, in 2020, they said.
In a statement, AFWERX spokesman Matthew Clouse said WorkMerk to date has received five contracts work a total of $3.9 million and a tactical funding increase contract for AFLINX in August 2023 intended to help the software grow from prototype to fieldable project.
The 932nd, he said, “is exploring software solutions to enhance planning, administration, management, readiness and communication processes. While Airmen are not currently using the software during its prototype stage, they are providing input on use cases to ensure any future acquisition decisions are informed by operational needs and end-user requirements.”
While it can be difficult to generate excitement about innovations in personnel management, they’ve had a warm reception in pitch meetings to a number of Air Force Reserve components, they said, including the 22nd, 10th and 4th Air Forces, and Air Force Reserve Command.
“It’s not hitting targets over the horizon with a hypersonic missile, right. That’s why it’s kind of a slow burn on people talking about it,” Wood said. “But we’ve … had nothing but praise and only the questions of, ‘When will it be ready?’ and ‘How much will it cost?’”
That cost, New said, was on the order of $100,000 per unit of 1,200 to 1,400 troops.
While WerkMerk has yet to branch out to other services, a Marine officer who spoke with Military Times confirmed that Reserve personnel management was a joint headache.
Col. Brian Pate, G-3 operations officer for Marine Corps Cyberspace Command, said the limited purview that commanders have over the schedules of their reservists, who may be spread out over a wide geographic region when not drilling, made the challenge more difficult.
“They may not be near a military medical treatment facility,” he said. “So, when they’re coming in, it may be that they have a very short window of time to execute a medical appointment or to hit the readiness requirement.
“You need to do very detailed planning to make sure that they succeed in doing the activity. So, having a management tool, I think, would help with that.”
