Across the Corps, 54 projects were submitted for the category of “Project Excellence,” and both Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton and the School of Infantry West were awarded the CPI honor.

The top three projects for the 2010’s awards were selected among the 54 nominees, and two out of the three were both recognized on base.

Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton’s Facilities Maintenance Department has seen a 20 percent increase in their workload since the construction on base began. Over the next four years, this increase will continue up to a total of 47 percent, according to the FMD symposium storyboard, which highlights their future plans for the base.

To meet the high demand for their workload, Facilities Maintenance Department’s General Support Team developed a project to reduce annual costs by $9.2 million with potential future annual savings of $10-15 million.

“The idea was to reduce response times for FMD’s work, increase customer satisfaction and reduce the annual costs,” said John Magnus, business manager, business performance office MCB Camp Pendleton. “Overall, our General Support team completed this task in a timely manner and accomplished the intention of saving the base money.”

In addition to the maintenance project, School of Infantry West’s Student Administrative Separation project was also awarded the CPI honor.

Previously, the average time to administratively separate a Marine from SOI-West was 36 days. The annual cost to hold the students at SOI reached a cost of $831 thousand. The SOI Administrative Separation’s project was able to cut this time in half and reduce the annual cost by $616 thousand in 2010.

“We cut out a lot of repetitive steps that were deemed unnecessary to administratively separate a student,” said Staff Sgt. Marc-Antonie Harris, platoon commander, separations platoon, SOI-West, Camp Pendleton. “We saw the problems, but we also saw how to fix them, so we did.”

The CPI awards recognize noteworthy achievements by organizations and individuals throughout the Marine Corps and are designed to continually improve the speed, quality and affordability of supporting processes to meet those requirements.

Camp Pendleton earned two of these awards for fiscal year 2010, which represents the functions and operations that are being applied across the base.

“These awards are selected as the best-of-the-best across the Marine Corps,” said Harry Jackson, Headquarters Marine Corps, CPI awards program. “We are proud to present these teams with this award because they managed to save the Marine Corps time and money.”