Tracking the Pieces
Written by Leslie Shaver
MLF 2010 Volume: 4 Issue: 7 (August)
New Technologies Make Tracking
the Parts and Pieces Easier.
When you think about the many places a military asset travels, there’s a lot of opportunity for it to be misplaced. Take a wrench, for instance. Every time a mechanic pulls it out of a tool box, it can be misplaced. To guard against that, the mechanic will account for tools against his or her inventory, but that’s time consuming.
And if something gets lost in a huge warehouse, tracking it becomes even more difficult, and can consume tremendous resources. To do an annual reconciliation by hand, someone needs to print off a listing all of the assets in the warehouse and account for each item. Then they’d check off the asset as they put it back on the shelf. Unfortunately, this manual and inefficient process has been the norm in the past, according to many vendors.
“The aerospace and defense supply chain is multi-tiered and the collaboration necessary to track assets, and critical information associated with those assets, through the internal and external networks associated with a program or platform are being done primarily through repetitive and often error prone manual processes,” said George Zdravecky, vice president of eBusiness solutions and product development for Inventory Locator Service (ILS), a Memphis-based company that assists aviation and defense companies in managing their supply chain.
Alternatively, there are a number of firms out there offering new technologies to help the military save money and time. With the possibility of budgets shrinking, the military and its contractors are putting an even greater focus on new technologies, like radio frequency identification (RFID), wireless sensors, and satellite and cellular communications that can help them keep track of their assets, whether they’re missing from a tiny tool box, a spacious warehouse or an entire desert. And in the future, those technologies don’t just promise to help the military track their assets, but also will also inform them of their condition.
Tracking Technology
The military learned the value of tracking its assets during the first Gulf War. During the conflict, the military unnecessarily stored three or four times more than they needed because they didn’t have visibility into what was inside the containers without manually opening them up, according to vendors who worked with them at that time. If someone needed a pair of boots or an MRE, they would have to blindly open boxes, which could often take hours to days.
In response to that, the military began interrogating the RFID tags on the containers with a handheld. After Desert Storm, Savi Technology helped the DoD build the In-Transit Visibility network, which is the world’s largest RFID-based cargo tracking system with over 4,000 locations in about 40 countries.
“It’s designed to provide real-time or near real-time visibility to the location and status of military assets and shipments and their content as they move from in-country depots into theater, in support of humanitarian relief efforts or war fighting efforts or peacekeeping efforts,” said David Shannon, vice president of product management, marketing and strategy for Mountain View, Calif.,-based Savi Technology, which provides RFID technology to both the U.S. and NATO forces.
If a product has a serial number, a company like Chantilly, Va.-based TASC probably produced a tag for it that’s programmed with unique RFID number, according to Barry Jones, an automated information technology integrator with the company.
These tags can prove to be critically important at the warehouse level. For instance, Jones says they can allow TASC to do scans of a warehouse every 15 minutes. If something is off, it notifies the user. “We’re constantly inventorying the system and running live reports to catch errors that occur in the warehouse in real time,” Jones said.
However, it takes more than RFID to do that kind of tracking. Recently, Shannon has seen the focus move to global positioning systems (GPS) transmitting information to satellite and cellular communications. “For critical cargo and transit routes and for certain critical cargo moved through hazardous transportation routes into theater, the customer is looking for continuing visibility through GPS and satellite communications,” Shannon said.
The GPS basically serves as a locator—showing the longitude, latitude and, if necessary, altitude. Then the satellite or cellular communication transfers that position back to the ground station. Shannon said the Department of Defense generally leans on satellite as its “backhaul” mechanism because the U.S. military is now in a lot of places—like Iraq and Afghanistan—that don’t have reliable cellular networks. And when there are cell towers, there’s no guarantee they will be reliable.
Even domestically, the United States relies on satellite transfer, since some of its warehouses and depots are in remote locations without good cellular coverage. The story is different with the European allies that work with Shannon though. “In Europe, [there is] a lot more focus for in-country tracking using cellular network because they’re so completely covered,” he said.
Managing Inventory
Technology helps track inventory, but it’s not the only answer. There are also a number of global supply chain services providers, like ILS, Rockford, Ill.,-based SupplyCore and Dallas-based Aviall. Aviall stocks $1 billion in new parts inventory from a catalog of two million different line items, from nuts and bolts to 747 tires to 200,000 engine components.
Aviall uses click commerce parts to manage inventory levels, plan/forecast for future demand, and offer original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) up to three years of future purchase order visibility by part number. It uses CDC Supply Chain as the warehouse automation behind its Dallas Fort Worth distribution hub, which averages 3,000 shipments per day. Lawson Insight serves as its enterprise resource planning (ERP) backbone, integrating each of these applications.
“Salespeople log every call, order and conversation with customers into our Siebel customer relationship management application,” said Eric Strafel, senior vice president of operations for Aviall. SupplyCore provides supply chain management services to the Department of Defense, handling anything from gaskets to truck beds. For smaller consumable items, accuracy can be a big challenge, according to David Hahn, vice president of corporate development for the company. “Some items are simple wood or plastic, while others have exacting and complex chemical coating processes,” Hahn said. “For these, making sure we maintain traceability and control of quantities as they move from the manufacturing site to the plating or coating facility and back through inspection to finished inventory also creates greater opportunities to lose visibility short-term.” Columbus, Ohio-based W.W. Williams Logistics also provides warehouse services, managing the supply chain for military suppliers, such as AM General, Agility, BAE Systems and Herndon Products. What distinguishes the company is that it works within the OEM supplier’s system to facilitate the supply process. “We don’t have to interlink with varios IT systems,” said John Sesler, supply chain manager at the company. “We eliminate the need for separate inventory control.”
Hahn said SupplyCore constantly evaluates its positioning and placement of materials to ensure that they are located in the most accessible and optimal location for warehouse staff. “Updating the handheld guns the warehouse staff use and the pick-flow order within our systems is critical in maintaining item and asset location accuracy,” he said. “We, and our government customers, have complete visibility once materials are receipted into inventory.”
Caldwell sees these challenges as well. “The processes associated with dispositioning, inspecting, allocating, working, issuing and tracking parts while they are in service or out of service are complex and clearly a challenge,” Caldwell said. “Certain parts in the supply chain are coded to national stock numbers assigned by DLA. These parts need additional references while moving through the supply chain since they follow specific rules for acquisition, allocation and disposition.”
ILS’ supply chain services handle these issues with fundamental supply chain visibility in the marketplace, internal and external supply chain collaboration with partners and customers, and supply chain management. “We define all of our business needs first—unconstrained by technology, then we solution architect our approach and select the right technology to serve the business need,” Caldwell said.
W.W. Williams warehouses parts and provides them to the artisians on the production line. “We’re looking at the usage of the parts at the depot level,” Sesler said. “On our recap/reset programs, our remanufacturing experience allows us to assist the depot and supplier in looking at the fallout of reclaim versus new parts.”
A Smarter Asset
Over the past couple of decades, the services have made major strides in supply chain visibility. The next frontier isn’t about supply chain location and visibility—it’s about knowing the condition of that asset. “We are preparing for the emergence of aviation and aerospace and defense complex assets directly linking critical information [in service data and out of service state data] to operational supply chain solutions to enable real-time tracking and proactive decision support for the experts who own, manage, maintain and operate them,” Zdravecky said.
Shannon said Savi has taken up the services on this directive to provide smarter assets, whether it’s a water purification system or major weapons system, with sensors that can evaluate whether assets have been exposed to extreme distress in travel or battle and therefore retrieved immediately to fix any problems.
For instance, Shannon envisions a system where a strain gauge with an embedded RFID chip on a helicopter’s rotors can communicate over a short range radio link back to an onboard computer to communicate system condition. “We’re promoting that you need to take these assets and their critical components and instrument them [with] low power wireless sensors that can communicate with soldiers about the state, condition, availability of these assets so they can become more active participants,” Shannon said. “These assets need to tell you when they’re ready and when they’re not ready.”
What is the ultimate payoff to this type of smart technology? It occurs on a number of levels. For one thing, there’s the obvious. Smart assets will enable servicemembers to have a greater knowledge of what they’re taking into battle. This will make them more effective and maybe even save lives.
“When it’s in the field, you need to have confidence that the one or two units you have are operational,” Shannon said. “For that happen, these assets need to get smart.”
There’s also the cost saving factor. Under the new Ash-Carter memorandum, the military will have a more limited budget. Smart systems can reduce the amount of time and money spent on maintenance, since they can help identify the systems that really need assistance. In short, if the military has a better knowledge of which assets are operational, it will be able to efficiently and effectively target resources only where needed.
“If you want the investment you made in critical military platforms to be effectively utilized for longer periods of time and execute the mission without extra equipment, then you to manage them in a more active way,” Shannon said. “The assets themselves need to become active participants in their own management. For that to happen, they need to be smart.” ♦
