Synchronizing Supply Transportation
Written by Tom Marlowe
DLA AND USTRANSCOM ARE UNDERTAKING A JOINT
DISTRIBUTION EFFORT TO ENSURE INTRA-THEATER
ASSET POSITIONING MAXIMIZES INTERTHEATER
TRANSITION EFFICIENCY.
“There was always this seam between strategic lift and theater lift,” Pattan told Military Logistics Forum. “There was always some ad hoc organization that was established to address that seam. The most visible issue was that stuff would pile up in theater.
“A lot of that was because there just wasn’t visibility between what was coming into theater and trying to integrate it with the theater lift. So these organizations were stood up ad hoc to address that problem,” Pattan said.
There were surface lifts, sealifts and airlifts to coordinate, but these temporary working groups were always dealing with it across the joint forces. Instead of continuing to deal with the mounting problem in a reactive way, planners at Joint Forces Command got together and created the concept of the Joint Deployment Distribution Operations Center (JDDOC), establishing the first such permanent group at CENTCOM to assist with its supply problems by synchronizing the strategic and theater transportation and distribution.
USTRANSCOM undertook the establishment of the JDDOCs as its first major effort as the distribution process owner at the Department of Defense. Now each combatant command has a DDOC unit, charged with optimizing transportation modes to maximize distribution and sustainment for U.S. forces. USTRANSCOM also has its own DDOC, which becomes the DDOC for U.S. Northern Command, or NDDOC, whenever a contingency arises that calls for DDOC support.
“The first JDDOC was the CENTCOM DDOC [CDDOC],” Pattan explained. “It was very successful, so we put together a plan with a timeline and tasks for what it would take to roll these JDDOCs out to each of the other theaters. Every time there was a contingency, like Haiti, each of the combatant commanders said, we want a JDDOC. One was established in response to those contingencies and then they left them in place. Some were bigger than others, depending on the need.
Each theater had a need for one before we went out there to deliberately establish one.” The theater DDOCs, however, report to their respective combatant commanders and not to the USTRANSCOM DDOC, which does provide global oversight to the organizations, Pattan described.
“We augment them during a contingency,” he commented. “During a minor contingency, they will augment them with internal staff. During a major contingency, USTRANSCOM and our national partners in DLA and the services augment the JDDOC. That is a critical capability. The JDDOC has the ability to reach back to TRANSCOM and our national partners and leverage global and national capability that the theaters may not have or even be aware of them. So we augment them by sending subject matter experts and those sorts of things that will benefit that theater.”
TRANSPORTATION BENEFITS
USTRANSCOM also convenes working groups where they invite representatives from the JDDOCs to share good ideas and lessons learned with one another. USTRANSCOM personnel occasionally visit the theater DDOCs to see what they are doing and to encourage them to work together using common systems and such.
The establishment of the JDDOCs has resulted in significant cost savings, Pattan reported. USTRANSCOM was not able to establish a baseline dollar amount of the costs of transportation inefficiencies from the beginning, but the U.S. military nonetheless has saved quantifiable money from the distribution process improvements introduced by the JDDOCs.
The JDDOCs have implemented transportation mode determination for supplies in theater by gaining visibility into the supply chain to see what is coming where and when. Then, combatant commands have the ability to have the right mode of transportation in place and on time, which saves money. “If you can look back in the supply chain and see things coming into theater, then you can do some forecasting,” Pattan declared.
“If you can do that, you can schedule sealift versus airlift and save a ton of money. That’s something that the JDDOCs are very good at. Each time they see something coming in via airlift and they can change that to sealift, those are documented savings. It justifies the existence of the CDDOC, for example.”
USTRANSCOM is working with the combatant commands to implement improvements to JDDOC operations, Pattan revealed. USTRANSCOM is working within the Joint Deployment Distribution Enterprise to build JDDOC capacity. Much of that effort involves brainstorming ideas on how to best send supplies along distribution nodes such as the JDDOCs. “The JDDOC is an extensible concept,” Pattan stated.
For example, combatant commands have been standing up JDDOC forward units to extend their reach into active parts of their theaters.
“The idea is that you have a main JDDOC like the CDDOC, for example. It is located in Kuwait. They have two major efforts there, Iraq and Afghanistan. If the CDDOC director wants to have visibility into those other areas, he can establish a JDDOC Forward. It could be one or two guys, or it could go all the way up to a full JDDOC with 20 guys or so.” The JDDOC concept is scalable.
USTRANSCOM has been paying attention to the systems the military should send to support a few supply chain experts in a JDDOC Forward versus a fully manned unit, so that it is prepared to support them as needed. USTRANSCOM and the combatant commands also have reached out to contractors to utilize their expertise in augmenting JDDOCs. JDDOCs also have been working on international agreements across theaters. With these international agreements, combatant commands can share resources or conduct flyovers within a foreign nation.
JDDOCs can duplicate these contracts and agreements worldwide if necessary, thus they benefit from staying in touch with each other on such efforts, Pattan noted.
SUPPLY CHAIN VISIBILITY
Lockheed Martin Corp. is building a new system for use by USTRANSCOM and the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) called IGC. IGC takes its name from the convergence of DLA’s Integrated Data Environment (IDE) with USTRANSCOM’s Global Transportation Network (GTN), or IDE/GTC Convergence.
“It is really going to be the architecture that provides data services and provides visibility of execution information as well as visibility into processes,” Angie Heise, director of Savi Logistics Systems at Lockheed Martin, told MLF.
USTRANSCOM and DLA operators will have asset visibility and transit visibility in addition to visibility into the quality of information available on the distribution network and the supply chain, Heise added. They will gain information on how their external partners, such as transportation carriers, are performing.
USTRANSCOM’s GTN is the current system of record for in-transit visibility, but IGC will retire it and become the new system of record next summer, Heise commented. In so doing, IGC brings significant new capabilities to USTRANSCOM and DLA, first and foremost, through connecting the DLA IDE into the system.
“GTN and IDE have a lot of similarities,” Heise remarked. “They have some of the same data, some of the same information. The idea was that maybe we should migrate the architecture to a services-oriented architecture and really strengthen the IT backbone and architectures that both of our systems are based on.
“IGC is so much more than GTN was ever envisioned to be,” she continued. “It has capabilities in it to really make full use of information services and data services. It allows the command to take advantage of other contractors in other companies to build capabilities using the IGC infrastructure.”
IGC will become the one place where any logistics specialist could go to discover exactly what is happening and when. It will reduce redundant interfaces within the DoD’s distribution networks, reducing confusion as to what supplies are where. IGC will deliver faster capabilities and serve as an authoritative source for warfighters, boosting their confidence in their supply chain, Heise said.
Lockheed Martin is assembling the system completely with commercial off-the-shelf components, Heise remarked, drawing upon commercially available software from its partners such as Terradata for the data warehouse provider, WebMethods as the business infrastructure software, and Business Objects as a reporting tool.
Lockheed Martin also is striving to empower users with personalization features in MyIGC. The contractor has been exploring how people use the Web with hopes of incorporating some naturally occurring practices into MyIGC. For example, the IGC team is looking at using the Google search tool to conduct simple searches in the system to find relevant information.
Warfighters already are seeing the benefits of the new system as the IGC contractor team introduces new services as a prelude to the full IGC system. They have delivered a service called Motor Carrier Compliance (MCC), for example, that provides visibility into transportation contracts.
“It has capabilities that allow the Service Deployment Distribution Command to look at some of the carriers that have transportation contracts, and it serves as a scorecard to allow them to see which carriers are meeting the requirements of the contract,” Heise commented. “That allows SDDC to work with those carriers to get better performance or be able to work with them and tell them where they fell short or where they have areas for improvement.”
About 30–40 carriers participate in MCC, while IGC will eventually receive transaction reports from about 140 transportation carriers overall, Heise noted.
Heise believes that implementing IGC offers opportunities for other federal agencies, both military and civilian, as well. “TRANSCOM and DLA have a strong vision of how this could be deployed for the benefit of all of DoD—how the Army could use it, how the Air Force could use it, and so on. We also believe there is potential use for other elements of the federal space. There are a lot of agencies out there that do work with and contract their own transportation carriers. We think this type of capability would be very useful for them,” she said.
SINGLE SOURCE TO TRUTH
When DLA decided it needed greater visibility into its supply chain, it contracted Accenture to establish the IDE for the agency.
“The function of that was the first step in DoD net-centric data strategy, which was making DLA’s data and a whole bunch of different data sources visible and rationalized that data and make it accessible to the warfighter in the field. It made it secure and, most importantly, it was the ‘single source of the truth,’” Joe Chenelle, Accenture’s senior account executive for DLA, told MLF.
“If you are out in theater, your numberone question is, where is my stuff?” continued Chenelle, who is the managing director of the Accenture Defense Industry Group. “So we linked a bunch of systems together around asset visibility to understand inventory management as well as where orders were and when they were expected to be received. If they don’t have that connectivity, they find themselves in the field reordering and reordering because they don’t know if what they ordered in the first place is ever going to get there.” Now DLA is working with USTRANSCOM to improve asset visibility and link that to customers and suppliers to enable decision-making and to tie that to the distribution process, Chenelle said.
Visibility is the first key thing required in any such undertaking, noted Jeff Miller, vice president of Accenture Defense Supply Chain Solutions. The military then has to leverage the information in its systems to become more proactive in managing the supply chain.
“How can we leverage all of that information out there to become more proactive and thereby optimize our cost to serve?” Miller queried. “That’s the next step. First it entails a common understanding of the data that is out there. Solutions like IDE do that. You have a common set of data that everyone is using, and then the next piece is common use and understanding of that data.
“For instance, all of the players within the supply chain need to have a common set of metrics that they are measuring success on. It’s very easy to take that information out there and come up with your own conclusions on it. So having a common understanding of that data is very important to improving performance,” he added.
Transportation providers, for instance, would receive a forecast of what materials their military customers require, Miller said, much like DLA already provides. DLA has begun forecasting at a much more detailed level lately, providing suppliers with customer item locations and the like.
“Because we are planning at a much more detailed level, you could take that customer item location information and integrate that into the transportation asset process and create optimization that way,” Miller remarked.
“If you were to forecast that a certain customer needs a number of different items at a certain time and you have a weight, size, cube of that information and the various dimensions of those products, you could combine that information with your forecast and then optimize the mode of transportation needed. If it’s bulky, it may need airlift or sealift or what have you.”
As DLA collaborates more with its customers, such processes continually improve, Miller noted.
Chenelle added that DLA relies upon its vendors to ship supplies directly post to post, particularly in cases of highly commoditized needs such as food, energy and medical supplies.
“They may be reliant upon a vendor’s capabilities for that distribution versus knowing that it’s definitely the optimal solution,” Chenelle acknowledged. “I don’t know that the military today knows it’s the optimal solution, but they know they have to get the stuff there and it’s the best solution that they have available.”
The military has “adapted, improvised and overcome” to do the best with the data that it has, Chenelle said. But with costsaving pressures and more information, they are looking to improve upon that. ♦