n the race to deliver information to every major U.S. military operation,the Defense Logistics Agency has turnedto some of the world’s top informationtechnology strategists for planning andimplementation agendas. Commercial en-tities have been able to answer the battlecry for delivery in better than real-time,beginning with the obvious deployment ofweb-browser technology to more complexprogramming assignments.

Bidders from worldwide consult-ing firms, such as Booz, Allen andHamilton offices on the East Coast, to spe-cialists in programming at Logicon Sysconnear the capitol, have taken on the dynamicopportunities available to revolutionize acontract processing system that still, insome cases, use proprietary programmingcode more than 20 years old.

Coordinating documents requiredfor electronic Request for Proposals trans-actions gives some insight into the myriadof back-end revisions that have taken placein the ’90s. “The ancient languages heldon mainframes and specialized applicationprogramming interface documents that of-ten were incorrect from the start for oldproprietary software had to be investigated,dissected and learned. This was done be-fore we could even start on the develop-ment of an automated bid interface involv-ing technical drawings. Needless to say, itwas a technical challenge from the wordgo,” said Travis Scarborough, subject mat-ter expert at Logicon Syscon.

The mission to develop a for-ward-thinking, growth-driven computer

Members of the DLA Europe Contin-gency Support Team at work duringexercise Bright Star ’95 in Egypt

IIIII

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infrastructure at DLA will continue to be adaily challenge. DLA manages the com-plete, computerized tracking of more than4 million items, processing more than 30million annual distribution actions and ad-ministering more than $900 billion of DoDand other agency contracts.

Recent years have seen the cou-pling of its tremendous databases, track-ing technology, military partnerships andelectronic commerce to leash the power ofthe Internet. Nearly every consumable partof the military from milk to medical sup-plies to ammunition is managed throughthis agency. Nowhere else in the U.S. doescomputerdriven logistics mean so much,nor affect so many daily lives.

B Y DAWN MARIE YANKEELOV

LOGISTICSLOGISTICSLOGISTICSLOGISTICSLOGISTICSSTRATEGYThe Defense Logistics Agency is working with the world’s top informa-

tion technology strategists in an integrated effort to deliver technology,

materials and information around the world.

THE

Based in Fort Belvoir, Va., more than50,000 civilian and military personnel work forDLA in facilities from supply centers to in-plantresidencies with defense contractors and propertyreutilization offices. In 1997, a new military modelof thinking, Concurrent Engineering (CE), wasdesigned to cope with further future computerintegration initiatives. The Computer-AidedAcquisition and Logistics Support (now calledContinuous Acquisition and Life-Cycle support)(CALS)/CE Industrial Steering Group (ISG),within the National Security Industrial Association,chartered task groups to identify issues and guidesto CE in the following areas: information exchange,electronic systems, mechanical systems, softwareand reliability and maintainability. The first report,presented at the Annual Reliability and Maintain-ability Symposium in Philadelphia in early 1997,outlined a competitive strategy for electronicsystem development.

In recent years, Web-enabled technologieshave greatly influenced the overhaul of the pur-chasing, tracking, and delivery of supplies. “Betterthan realtime” is how the system has been de-scribed by Carla Von Bernewitz, executive directorof Material Management, Information Systems &Technology in DLA. Commercialization has creptinto its programs, allowing for supply chain

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The AutomatedManifest System andradio frequencytagging at work inTaszar, Hungary.

“Speed is the new virtue in industry. Reducing time-to-marketis going to be the high-priority goal for the leading manufac-turers in the future.” Dr. Rajan Sun, University of Wisconsin

management on the Net.“Delivery of information atthe desktop is critical. We are trying to leverage ourexisting infrastructure. We have even enlistedFederal Express in Memphis. We are pre-positionedand can request high priority when necessary,” saidVon Bernewitz. DLA oversees nine primarycommodities: clothing, including uniforms, helmetsand shoes; construction material, such as lumberand plumbing accessories; electronic supplies usedin maintenance and repair of military equipment;fuel, such as bulk petroleum; canned, frozen, anddehydrated food; general supplies, such as machinetools and wet-cell batteries; and medical supplies,including prescription drugs and surgical materials.

For more than 50 years, DLA has been theprocurement agency for DoD. In the 1940s, it wasdetermined that vast warehousing would be themodel of choice. However, today’s mobile militaryis focused on 24-hour response, and dealing withimmediate needs with a button click of a desktopcomputer.

PRIME VENDOR AND VIRTUAL PRIMEVENDOR PROGRAMS

Commercial products from householdnames are now providing items previously boughtfrom hundreds of vendors through EDI (ElectronicData Interchange). With the Prime Vendor program,

reciprocal links to suppliers and military con-sumers takes place. For example, the purchaseof food has moved from buying centers to in-dividual customers. Troops now eat the samefood we find in area hotels and restaurants.Competitive pricing is guaranteed, and brandnames are now on all bases within 48 hours,such as Parris Island Marine Corps Base inSouth Carolina.

Medical inventory is handled in muchthe same manner. DLA supplies one of the larg-est hospital networks in the world. Mail orderpharmacies and medical air express made greatstrides in aiding a monolithic delivery process,but Prime Vendor contracts went further. Cov-erage in the program is now global. Emergencydeliveries can be made within six hours. Lossesfrom expirations and overstocking have beeneliminated.

McKesson Drug Company won thefirst pharmaceutical contract several years agofor the Washington, D.C. area. Four major com-petitors dominate the U.S. consolidated medi-cal-surgical supplies market, includingMcKesson and another DLA supplier, Owens& Minor, Inc. The general upswing for Owens

& Minor continues in large part to its $30 milliondefense contracts thanks to four medical-surgicalsupply prime vendor contracts from the DefensePersonnel Support Center. Over the next five years,the estimated total sales for the Nation’s Capitalregion alone is approximately $163 million forOwens & Minor.

Online catalogs for medical supplies, foodand clothing allow for unique inventory control,linked to a Material Management Intranet. “In thepast we would have contracted for 15 differentvendors for just two different products. This re-quired longterm warehousing,” Von Bernewitzsaid. With the recent Virtual Prime Vendor pro-gram, there is no warehousing of product.

Virtual Prime Vendor allows tailored lo-gistics support to particular military “customers”by electronically linking all consumable parts,whether for combat readiness, emergency pre-paredness or day-to-day operations. Agreementsallow the military regional purchases with an es-tablished delivery process - less governmentese,more commercial handling. With Virtual vendors,there are specialized contract management services from preaward to post-award; worldwide disposalservices as well as information of excess mili-

tary property; worldwide hazardous material dis-posal, and information in its management; special-ized product testing; and access to the Federal Cata-log system.

In turn, companies such as Owens & Minorare generating dollars for other computer deliverysystems to support their efforts. Recently the com-pany purchased PowerMart, a data warehouse de-veloped by Informatica Corp. in Menlo Park, Calif.PowerMart is used by Owens to bring sales datainhouse, supporting processes for customer serviceand sales. Owens currently stores its data on anoutsourced mainframe computer and pays monthlyfees based on usage.

Electronic commerce has moved the agencyto a paperless society, and more progress is expected.

The Federal Acquisition Streamlining Actrequires the federal government to transform the ac-quisition process to a computer-based system readilyaccessible to government and private users, includ-ing small businesses. Though the act originallycalled for agencies to be up and running on EDI by1997, an extension will allow some agencies to waituntil 1999.

Federal agencies are posting requests forquotes on their individual Internet home pageWebsites, and Electronic Data Resource Centershave been set up as federally-funded agencies to helpsmall businesses with their government transactions.

By filling out a two-page Central Contrac-tor Registration form by March 1998 and filing itelectronically, firms no longer need to register indi-vidually with every federal site with which they dobusiness. All procurement contracts between $2,500and $100,000 will be restricted to small businesses,minority and women-owned firms. For example, theIowa Procurement Outreach Center has a hand ineducating firms looking to get involved in this EDItrend. Six Iowa federal suppliers are installing andgetting training to use hardware and software nowavailable to a few manufacturers through the Busi-ness Network Training Program.

Concurrent Technologies Corp. is one oftwo companies under contract with the Departmentof Defense’s logistics agency to run electronic com-merce centers. The centers assist both governmentagencies and small companies in adapting electroniccommerce technologies, including EDI.

By 2010, all contracts will be handled incyberspace, without pencil touching paper. Contracts

have migrated to commercial corporations willing tohandle larger orders and stockpile at their facilitieswhen necessary. The savings show up not only in lesswarehousing requirements, but also in personnel.

David Cannon, technical director for elec-tronic catalogs at Management Technology AdvancedSystems in Fairmont, W. Va., helped to develop thiseffort by working with IBM Mainframe types. Can-non makes the point that IT people do not want tohost the new hardware. “They do not want to look atthe new development requirements. The IT peoplewant to know why this can’t bedone in Cobol,” Cannon toldComputerWorld in a recent inter-view. He pointed out that DLA andothers believe that all suppliershave information available in auseful electronic format and thatthis is not necessarily the case.Military objectives do not differmuch from commercial issuesraised at large companies, such asUS West, 3Com, and others, headded.

THE NA VY PRESSESCONTRACT INFORMA TIONTO SMALL BUSINESS

The Navy has been aggressive in the last 12months in deploying information and communicationtechnology to its fleets and potential contractors.Three demonstration ships in San Diego now show-case an off-the-shelf LAN with a full-motion videosystem, real-time video, voice, and data transmissions,and a UHF radio modified for realtime audio, video,and data. Every U.S. Navy ship is expected to havethese interactive media systems within three years.This communications structure then assists in logis-tics deployment with all armed forces.

Online activity finds ways to identify tech-nology solutions. The Navy’s Fleet and IndustrialSupply Center (FISC) plans to add more local busi-nesses to its technological endeavors by expandingcontract information on the Net. The FISC Web site(www.sd.fisc.navy.mil) relates to companies’ govern-ment marketing strategies. The types of FISC con-tracts include industrial supplies and repairs, indus-trial parts, and hardware/software. FISC distributednearly $700 million worth of commercial contractsin 1996.

A Marine recruitscans input into acomputer usingelectronic datainterchangetechnology.

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The Quick Response Manufacturing ap-proach is played out with large and small vendorsalike. “Speed is the new virtue in industry,” saidQRM expert Dr. Rajan Suri, director of manufac-turing systems engineering, Center for Quick Re-sponse Manufacturing at the University of Wis-consin. “Reducing time-to-market is going to bethe high-priority goal for the leading manufactur-ers in the future.”

A small female-owned business based inPhoenix, Arizona, Atlas Headwear supplies Nike,Inc., one of DLA’s Quick Response vendors. At-las now can provide the military with uniform capswithin 72 hours of receiving an order. Other manu-

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“How else can we reach every potential supplier inter-

nationally?... When you post a proposal on the Web,

you have an instantaneous international bid room”

John Karpovich, Defense Logistics Agency

QRM TECHNIQUES IN THE MILITARY

for bids. The issue of physical possession of documen-tation in order to provide accurate bids used to be a bigone, said John Karpovich, Chief Information Officerfor DLA. “We used to have to send out packages topotential vendors upwards to $10 or more of paper withmaps, drawings etc. Now technical data is hotlinked toengineering-related materials,” he pointed out. An Au-tomated Bid Interface was designed by Logicon inMcLean, Va., for this streamlining effort.

The original Logicon project began back in1992. “Getting DLA to define the scope of the projectwas difficult. For starters, we were dealing with an 841-transaction set, and not all 841-transaction systems arealike. The TISCA system, one of the procurement sys-tems in use at DLA, which checks technical data againstthe national stock number, and the Defense Procure-ment Activity System, a giant list of open solicitationsin the world, posed hurdles as well,” said Scarborough,a subject matter expert.

He added that the biggest hurdle wasJEDMICS, developed originally for the Navy. Thistechnical drawing repository on optical disks was verydifficult to back-end, he said. Nonetheless, the first pi-lot was deployed in June 1995 at the Defense SupplyCenter in Columbus and passed all government-re-quired testing.

In the last two years, the use of the World WideWeb heated up further at DLA, according to Karpovich.“The maturation of the Web has fed the demand side.How else can we reach every potential supplier inter-nationally? This has, in turn, created a 60 percent sav-ings in time. When you post a proposal on the Web,you have an instantaneous international bid room.”With Java applications, Microsoft and Netscape serv-ers and software, the military has spent the last 10months refining its virtual inventory control points.More than $50 million will be spent with Microsoftand Netscape in the next five years.

DLA’s five inventory control points - at FortBelvoir, Va., Philadelphia, Pa., (two points), Colum-bus, Ohio, and Richmond, Va. - buy the items used inall military areas. The agency supports more than 1,400weapons systems, and purchases 86 percent of the to-tal number of items used by the Defense Department.More than 20 million requisitions a year, representingsales of more than $11 billion annually to the militarycustomers, work their way through DLA.

facturers involved in this military partnering in-clude Alabama-based American Apparel, the Na-tional Industries for the Blind, and Terry Manu-facturing, a small minority-owned firm that has ashared production agreement with McDonald’s.

Yet another approach called Dual-UseTechnology allows for shared production agree-ments with manufacturers and commercial clients.This ensures that when a facility’s full productioncapabilities are needed for national defense, it willoccur in an immediate fashion.

Other large corporations that participatein supplying DLA through an electronic commerceforum are 3M, Grimes Aerospace, Cummins En-gine, Allied Signal and Boeing.

CALS (COMPUTER-AIDED ACQUISI-TION AND LOGISTICS SUPPORT)

One of the challenges in DLA is to coor-dinate the information required on an RFP. Notevery document can be boiled down into words.Even office furniture sometimes requires exten-sive technical drawings. DLA, through computer-added acquisition and logistics support (CALS),has been able to create the architecture necessaryto have plug and play specifcations available online Continued on page 206

Success stories have occurred in every facet ofmilitary operation, including the DefenseFinance & Accounting Service. Karpovich saidthere has been a big savings in both accuracyand printing costs. Coding issues, such asunmatched disbursements, have virtuallycleaned themselves up.

DLA is also working on a pro-activeapproach to anticipate contingency supportproblems and to improve peacetime support in aplan dubbed the Integrated Consumable ItemSupport Model.

THE AUTOMATED MANIFEST SYSTEMAND RF TAGS

Once ordered, the tracking process ofgoods and services through DLA leaves verylittle guesswork. Information Spectrum, Inc. hasdeveloped an automated manifest system for themilitary that creates instant receipts and logsnecessary information about a shipment’scontents. An optical memory or laser card in athin, credit-card format is used and can with-stand harsh weather or combat. These plasticcards required intensive training; however, aprototype test at Ft. Polk, La., in 1994, provedthat processing receipts could be done in 66percent less time. Personnel requirements werecut by more than a third. AMS has since beendeployed in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Yet another tagging approach keepsreal-time monitoring available through wirelesscommunication tools. RF tags are satellite-monitored and can be read by hand-heldscanners with precision. A tracking mechanismknown as INTRANSIT, or InternationalTransportation Information Tracking, recordsmessages and positions from moving vehicles.This monitoring allows for personnel on thereceiving end to be prepared with appropriateequipment or staff to move the cargo to its finaldestination.

The Logistics StrategyContinued from page 76

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DAWN MARIE YANKEELOV is a freelancetechnology writer based in Louisville, Ky.Portions of this article originally appeared

in The Department of Defense: 50thAnniversary 1997 Faircount Interna-tional, Inc