LACKLAND AIR FORCE BASE, Texas –
Last year, Donna Leeth looked around her office and squadron and noticed several needs: new chairs, laptop computers, monitors and printers and smart boards.
With funding being cut, she said, people have to find ways to provide things faster and easier and make the process flow more easily.
Ms. Leeth, who works out of the manpower office, took action.
Instead of wishing she had all of the new equipment she needed for her squadron, she went out and got it, using the Productivity Enhancing Capital Investment program.
"The mission of the PECI program is to provide expedited funding for capital acquisition projects that provide measurable benefits and real savings to the Air Force," she said.
"It provides funding for productivity improvement projects. They identify the investment opportunities that can provide a lot of savings that can produce a return on an investment in about two to four years."
The PECI program is all about productivity. The more the project saves in productivity costs, the more money the base gets to keep.
Any money that is saved through PECI is kept at the base where the project originated.
"We spent just under $200,000," said Ms. Leeth. "But we had a savings of a little more than $400,000. So even though we had to pay back the money we spent, we had a significant amount of savings."
How did Ms. Leeth get her project off the ground?
"We used four positions that were already going to be cut," she said. "They were falling off the books anyway, so why not use them to invest in stuff that we need to make our job easier because we're going to be without as many people now? We could use those positions as our investment for payback."
Ms. Leeth also said that any positions that are scheduled to be cut can be used for the PECI program.
"There are other types of positions you can use for this," she said. "Sometimes there are positions where there's no one in them anyway, and you can give them up to get involved with this program.
"Then after you pay the loan back with those positions, you can keep the positions, but just in a different office. Say us in manpower, we gave up a position, well, when the loan is paid back, we couldn't put the position back in manpower, but we could put it in the education office. There are so many ways to borrow the money for the PECI program."
For more information on the PECI program, go to
https://peciweb.seguetech.com.