# Requirements Management System 

/ Published March 3, 2017
MAXWELL AIR FORCE BASE, Ala., A long time ago in a galaxy far away...  No, really, about four or five decades ago, a system was developed to project the buy and repair requirements across the Air Logistics Complexes. In this case, the term “requirements” refers to the necessary supplies to complete the maintenance and repair of the weapons systems.The Requirements Management System can be described as a planning engine, working in the background to track needs and project requirements, serving the planning processes of the ALCs.The Requirements Management System is composed of several computing applications.  The RMS D200 suite resides on the IBM z/OS mainframe platform hosted at the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Data Center in Ogden, Utah. This suite has seven components, with users across the United States, primarily Item Managers and Equipment Specialists in support of the ALCs.The primary planning component of RMS D200 is Secondary Item Requirements System.  SIRS computes spare parts requirements for all weapons systems customers worldwide on an aggregate basis, and applies all available worldwide assets to these requirements.  SIRS uses historical failure and program data for each item to determine a failure rate to be applied to a future program.  Time-phased computations are done quarterly for approximately 96,000 Air Force managed national stock numbers that are secondary items installed in a higher assembly such as an aircraft, a vehicle, a piece of equipment. The results of these computations provide expendable, recoverable, and repairable requirements quarterly, which are then passed to other D200 components and systems, including Central Secondary Item Stratification.The Central Secondary Item Stratification process manipulates the planning data for the recoverable and consumable items, relating assets to requirements in specific priority and time sequence. CSIS products relate requirements and assets to demand periods, permitting development of supply positions. CSIS data are used to analyze and evaluate requirements, to develop the Department of Defense budget and to provide status reports on inventory.  Separate stratification process positions are prepared for budgeting and repair.There are four additional D200 components that support the SIRS and CSIS planning processes.  The Initial Requirements Determination process computes the initial recoverable and consumable requirements for new weapon systems.  The Applications Program Indenture process maintains the record of the indentured physical structure of items, relating the components and their next higher assemblies.  The Requirements Item Identification process maintains the item cataloging data used by the SIRS process, managing the updates with other item cataloging systems. The Equipment Item Process maintains the additive requirements for equipment items, including the Interchangeability and Substitutability structure used in requirements planning.In addition to the D200 suite, RMS also has four smaller, specialized components.  Three of these; the War Reserve Material Lists Requirements and Spares Support Lists, the Weapon System Support Program and the Other War Reserve Material Requirements  support the requirements planning for particular entities and operations.  The fourth specialized component is the Stratification of Principal and Secondary Items Report, known as DD1000. This is part of an annual report to Congress from the Department of Defense on the status of on-hand inventory.The complete suite of RMS applications serve a vital role in the planning and projection of buy and repair requirements for the ALCs.  Some of the components of RMS have been working for many decades, and the AFLCMC/HIAR RMS Program Office keeps these applications operational, striving to meet the needs of today’s users and operating environments.*Editor's note: The original story can be viewed on the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base website.*