USS Theodore Roosevelt to be the first ship to implement paperless process
USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) began implementing a paperless routing system named "R-Rider," Nov. 26, which will make it the first ship in the fleet to abandon the use of printed chits and paperwork in favor of an electronic system.
TR will begin using the R-Rider program Dec. 1 in conjunction with paper forms on a trial basis beginning to ensure all the kinks have been worked out.
R-Rider began as just a simple idea which grew into something that will hopefully change the current way the Navy routes paperwork as we know it. The R-Rider system will have the capability to route awards, basic allowance for housing requests, evaluations, special request chits, leave chits, and more, all with a few clicks of a mouse.
According to the ship's Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) team, the vision of Capt. William Hart, TR's commanding officer, is to go completely paperless. So, the team began brainstorming ideas to make this happen.
The amount of paperwork that would come across the commanding officer and executive officer's desk would be stacked up to the overhead, the majority of those being chits requiring their signatures. The new R-Rider program allows the chain of command to review the same amount of paperwork in nearly half the time.
R-Rider is an electronic routing program that allows Sailors to type up their requests or attaches them to the R-Rider system. Sailors have the ability to control where their chits and paperwork are routed to and can log on at any time to check the status of their paperwork instead of tracking down their chain of command to find out the status.
"More than 400 Sailors from various departments aboard have attended the R-Rider training so far," said Machinist's Mate 1st Class (SW/AW) Mark Leinaar.
Leinaar took on the task of training the crew on the basic use of the R-Rider system before it goes command-wide later this month.
"My goal is to get the entire crew trained and proficient in how to use this program," said Leinaar.
One of TR's very own Sailors developed the R-Rider program. Logistics Specialist 2nd Class (SW/AW) Joseph Williams has a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and spent countless off-duty hours creating and programming the R-Rider program.
"It took about the span of three months to program the R-Rider system," said Williams. "It started with a basic online tracker and then I scaled it up from there."
TR's Aircraft Intermediate Maintenance Department (AIMD) was lucky enough to perform the beta testing on the R-Rider program. Only a few minor programming errors were found in the system, which consists of more than 6,000 lines of code.
The CPI team, led by Chief Aviation Support Equipment Technician (AW/SW) James Bibow and Chief Aviation Electronics Technician (AW/SW) Glenn Hart, took over the R-Rider system after the initial beta testing and insisted the program be implemented for the entire command to use.
"Our goal is to have this program take off fleet wide," said Leinaar.
Source: http://www.navy.mil/
