Defense logistics agency issue - KMI Media Group

More documents

Recommendations

Info

“The idea is to tap into industry capabilities and expertise to do a better job than we could do on a macro level,” said Rodocker. “In this way we are able to reduce costs, improve parts support and provide better troubleshooting for the customer.” Oshkosh Defense has several long-term contracts with DLA land and maritime, including the recently awarded hybrid long-term contract. “What we did was to identify this population of parts that had significant recurring demand to make them eligible candidates for long-term contract coverage,” said Lorinda Lewis, Oshkosh Defense’s director of DLA programs. “We did a lot of analysis to help DLA understand the buying patterns of the customer from us and from DLA and helped them to determine appropriate parts to add to the contract. We also estimated annual demands for the parts.” Hybrid covers a variety of products that are included on many platforms. “They are not unique to one specific vehicle,” said Lewis. “DLA is looking for coverage. If there is enough demand it can be added to a long-term contract. It saves DLA the administrative burden of issuing one-time contracts over and over.” Each contract has its own performance specifications, most of them surrounding on-times deliveries. When products are added to existing long-term contracts, the performance criteria applicable to that contract automatically prevail for those added parts. Many of the parts contracts have users, rather than DLA, ordering parts directly from the vendor. Demand planning is one of the cornerstones of streamlining supply chains. Both DLA and its vendors engage in this activity. Lean Management of Logistics: Warfighter Support and Stewardship Excellence June 25th – 27th, 2012 • Washington, D.C. Metro Area KMI Readers Save 20% off the standard all-access fee with code: KMI_MLOG Vice Admiral John T. Blake, USN, Integration of Capabilities & Resources, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations Heidi Shyu, SES, Acquisitions, Logistics and Technology, Assistant Secretary of the Army Major General Wendy M. Masiello, USAF, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Contracting, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition Redding Hobby, SES, Deputy Director of Logistics Operations, Defense Logistics Agency Gail Jorgenson, SES, Director of Acquisitions, U.S. Transportation Command Rear Admiral Patricia E Wolfe, Director – Joint Reserve Force, Defense Logistics Agency www.MilitaryLogisticsSummit.com 8 | MLF 6.5 In the early 2000s, DLA deployed a planning and forecasting module from Manugistics, a company which has since been absorbed by JDA, and integrated that with its SAP enterprise resource planning system. DLA started feeding Manugistics with data in 2003. In 2006, all items subject to demand forecasting—around 80,000 faster moving products with recurring demand—were in the system. Manugistics gathers historical demand data and applies those through algorithms to several different categories of items that DLA carries. Current programmatic intelligence, as well as seasonal and cyclical elements, can also be added to the forecasting mix. “The accuracy of the demand forecast depends on the item and on its design stability,” said Roberts. “Demand for new systems such as the MRAP, which was first fielded in Iraq, is more difficult for any statistical forecast to plan. The system can take into account current demand information supplied by customers.” “Oshkosh uses advanced demand planning allows us to provide very quick contract pricing and very quick product delivery,” said Bryant. “We are working with the DLA supply chains to constantly refine demand planning and refine prices to drive parts prices down over time and in order to provide just-in-time deliveries to customers. It allows us to provide a precisely quoted price and to complete delivery a short period of time after a request for quote is issued.” One demand planning technique that Oshkosh Defense has refined is to analyze demand for products based by demand stream. In other words, demand for a part is analyzed separately depending on whether part was ordered on a long-term contract, short-term contract, or spot buy. “This gives us better visibility into patterns of demand and it has allowed us to refine the demand planning process,” said Lewis. “When we look at each demand stream individually we can see how demand is changing from the perspective of the customer base and it enables us respond to customers appropriately. It allows us to adjust on-hand quantities to better match demand patterns. Analyzing demand streams as a group produced a lot of noise and in variability of demand. We also use an application that allows us to see how accurate our demand planning is.” DLA’s strategy of combining long-term contracts with demand planning has reduced inventory levels and saved DLA and the taxpayers money. “Inventory levels would definitely be higher because we would have to make spot buys at higher material costs,” said Rodocker. From Oshkosh’s perspective, the process is all about reducing costs and improving deliveries and quality over time. “We are constantly re-examining and remapping the entire value chain in all of our commodity and service areas to make continuous improvements,” said Bryant. “We work hard to ferret out inefficiency from the earliest stage of the value stream and the lowest level supplier all the way to customer delivery.” “DLA is seeking cost reduction across its range of contracts,” said Lewis. “They are taking a hard-nosed approach to any price increases. If we have a cost increase, no matter how insignificant, they are looking for an explanation for why our costs and theirs went up. We work hard with our own supply base and challenge them. We can sometimes evaluate an opportunity to buy in larger quantities in order to reduce costs for the customer when we see that there is demand across multiple demand streams.” “We are not that different than big businesses in the private sector,” said Roberts. “They develop long-term contracts and good working relationships with key suppliers and so do we. Working with and building our industrial base is one of our key focuses.” O www.MLF-kmi.com
At first glance, the containers used to ship military equipment and supplies around the world appear not to have changed much over the past half-century. Walk into any shipyard and the same cranes seem to be moving the same containers they moved roughly 60 years ago when container sizes became standardized worldwide. A closer look, however, will reveal some significant evolutions in these containers as well as in the hard cases used to transport everything from weapons and electronics to medical supplies. Many of them have chemical agent resistant coatings on them. A growing number have electromagnetic interference (EMI)/radio frequency interference (RFI) protection to keep signals from emanating outside or coming into the container. Some have been cleverly engineered into energy-efficient shelters while others, through high-tech GPS tags, can be tracked and inventoried anywhere in the world. As of May 2012, the Department of Defense owned 333,486 registered containers, according to the Military Surface Deployment and Distribution Command’s (SDDC) Global Container Management (GCM) branch. Between 7,000 and 10,000 of that total were added in the last five years. Just under half the total inventory is comprised of the 20-foot container, by far the most common container in the system. “The 20-foot container is number one because of its ease of use,” said Thomas Catchings, programs, systems and training lead for SDDC’s GCM branch. “It can be moved by a large or small element. You can stack them, you can put them on a truck. When we ship equipment overseas, once the 20-foot container gets there, it can be used for force protection, for storage and more. That kind of agility is what we’re looking for.” GCM is currently working with other military organizations to create a comprehensive, single-source solution for tracking how packages, cases and shipping containers are evoLving in today’s agiLe, energy-conscious miLitary. By heather BaLdwin mLf correspondent all containers in the DoD system throughout their life cycles, from procurement to disposal. “It will be a system for anyone in DoD to go into and have total visibility on a container—where it is, the maintenance cycle, the money owed on it,” said Catchings. “Today, we have different buckets for all that information with different people covering different lanes throughout the container life cycle.” Catchings expects funding for this program to begin flowing in fiscal year 2013. The complexities of creating such a system are apparent when one considers the overwhelming number of variables in today’s container designs. Sea Box Inc., for instance, currently offers hundreds of designs and is adding three or four new ones every week in response to customer requests, said Sea Box President Jim Brennan. While most of these designs are one-time custom builds, Brennan has observed several overarching trends, mostly related to the military’s efforts to go green. For instance, sandwich panel construction is increasingly popular. Unlike corrugated steel, sandwich paneling is built using multiple layers of foam, fiberglass and other insulating materials bonded together. “It’s equally as strong as corrugated, but it’s insulated,” said Brennan. “So you can get more insulation in the same amount of space [as corrugated], or you can get the same insulation in less space. You then use less energy and that’s the trend—moving toward more energy efficiency.” A similar shift is occurring in the area of insulating paint, which uses thermally reflective materials to reduce heat transfer through the coating, thereby reducing the energy needed to cool a container’s interior. Sea Box has offered this option for about five years but only recently has Brennan noticed an uptick in interest. “It’s been growing slowly because it’s expensive,” he said, “but people are starting to look more at their total energy life cycle costs and the reflective paint reduces those costs over the long term.” In response to the U.S. Army’s efforts to reduce energy usage housing soldiers in Afghanistan and elsewhere, Sea Box recently rolled out the Collapsible Re-deployable Shelter (CRS). The CRS is built from a shipping container with high-grade insulation in the walls and roof. It includes LED lighting and an electrical package, and it collapses to 2 feet in height for shipping. When four collapsed shelters are stacked, they are the same size and shape as a standard cargo container, making them easy to move via ship, truck and rail. The Army recently finished six months of testing the CRS and other similar solutions at Fort Devens, Mass. Brennan anticipates the written results of that testing to be delivered in June. In the meantime, a major defense contractor just ordered a CRS complex with EMI shielding. “EMI-shielded collapsible shelters are brand new,” said Brennan, adding that the shelter will be complete by August. “More customers are asking for EMI/ RFI shielding and chem/bio features,” echoed Jason Raffaele, director of engineering at AAR Mobility Systems. “Our customers are putting more people and electronics in shelters deployed to austere environments, requiring ever-increasing cooling capacity and dehumidification.” AAR Mobility Systems traces its history of providing turn-key mobility and sustainment solutions to 1963 when it began manufacturing aluminum cargo pallets for the U.S. Air Force. Today, it continues to support the defense marketplace via the prototype, design, manufacture, integration and life cycle support of a wide variety of shelters, containers, CROPs and flat racks, pallets and palletized systems, and integrated platforms. Beyond the growing number of requests for EMI/RFI shielding, Raffaele said the military is placing increased emphasis on weight and energy efficiency. “Lighter systems mean more payload and less fuel,” explained Mark www.MLF-kmi.com MLF 6.5 | 9
Page 1 and 2: Supply Optimizer Redding Hobby Acti
Page 3 and 4: Military logistics ForuM June 2012
Page 5 and 6: SPOTLIGHT: Global Tracking Soluti o
Page 7 and 8: A next generation fighter takes a n
Page 9: forecasting, lower administrative c
Page 13 and 14: MILITARY CONTAINERS Quadcon Tricon
Page 15 and 16: We used a lot of things we develope
Page 17 and 18: hundred to a couple hundred thousan
Page 19 and 20: SUPPLY CHAIN General Dynamics NASSC
Page 21 and 22: Q&A Maintaining a Globally Responsi
Page 23 and 24: In a war fought with stealth fighte
Page 25 and 26: AAR has more of what government and
Page 27 and 28: A: Our mantra is “Warfighter Supp
Page 29 and 30: company primarily works with DLA to
Page 31 and 32: With nearly $15 billion in sales pr
Page 33 and 34: The advertisers index is provided a
Page 36: 13-0242 Logistics Solutions for Aff

Defense logistics agency issue - KMI Media Group

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?