Q&A: Mae DeVincentis

MLF 2011 Volume: 5 Issue: 10 (November/December)

 

Mae E. DeVincentis became the vice director for the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) in August 2010. DLA is the U.S. Department of Defense’s combat logistics support agency, providing worldwide logistics support for materiel and personnel readiness, and sustainment of military departments and unified combatant commands under conditions of peace and war. It also provides logistics support to other DoD components and certain federal agencies, foreign governments, international organizations and others as authorized. DeVincentis is the agency’s second in command. She assists the director in all aspects of leading the global DLA enterprise.

Before becoming vice director, she was director of logistics operations (J-3) since January 2010. She led all aspects of DLA’s worldwide warfighter support mission, which provides most consumable spare and repair parts and virtually all clothing, food, medical supply and fuel items used by military forces worldwide, involving over $40 billion in annual sales of logistics materiel and services.

DeVincentis was previously director of information operations (J-6) and chief information officer (CIO) for DLA since April 2001. She was responsible for all agency information technology (IT) activities across 11 sites, involving a staff of over 3,000—including modernization of the agency’s principal business systems, sustainment of contemporary business systems, program management for acquiring and implementing major automated information systems (MAIS), information assurance, and overall IT policy guidance and operational performance. She was also responsible for DoDwide logistics information operations that included cataloging, electronic routing of logistics transactions, a logistics customer interaction center, logistics process guidance and DoD document services.

Her prior assignment was as the program executive officer (PEO) and deputy director of information operations (IO). As the PEO, DeVincentis had management and oversight of DLA’s MAIS programs and special interest programs. As deputy director for IO, she also assisted the IO director in overseeing all agency IT functions. Before becoming the PEO in early 2000, DeVincentis served as executive director for information systems and technology for the Defense Logistics Support Command (DLSC), then a major DLA subordinate command. She provided a comprehensive IT systems strategy to facilitate DLSC’s business objectives, including oversight of the business systems modernization program that became the core of DLA’s transformation to meet the challenges of 21st-century logistics support.

Prior to joining DLSC in 1998, DeVincentis held a variety of leadership positions in contracting, logistics and information technology at the then-Defense Personnel Support Center Philadelphia.

DeVincentis attended Temple University, where she received both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business administration. She is a member of the Senior Executive Service and the Defense Acquisition Corps, and has served on a variety of DoD and public/private sector councils. She has received numerous honors, including two Presidential Rank awards, Civilian Meritorious and Exceptional Service Awards, the DLA Exceptional Civilian Service Award, the DLA Meritorious Civilian Service Award and the DLA Employee of the Year Award.

Q: In what ways has DLA evolved over the years to better support the warfighter?

A: DLA began as the Defense Supply Agency in 1961. That was based on the department recognizing in the late-1950s post-war environment that there was a lot of duplication and overlap and high inventory levels among the services.

The goal was to manage common supply and distribution services to create efficiencies while being effective, and thus began the journey that we’re still on. I think we have been very successful over the years in meeting this basic goal. Even early in my tenure at DLA I watched as we added missions and different supply chain roles in areas like property reuse and disposal, fuel management and various other mission sets. In 1977 we were renamed Defense Logistics Agency in recognition of the fact that we were doing Big L logistics, meaning more than inventory management, more than supply—really expanding into a broader gamut of logistics services.

We became a combat support agency in the 1980s as a result of Goldwater-Nichols. Over the years we took on more responsibility, especially in areas that involved a closer on-scene role in supporting equipment maintenance and the readiness and sustainment of deployed forces. And with that, we of course had more business. The early 1990s were a big part of this as things really began to change at a much more rapid clip. The DMRDs [defense management report decisions] realigned a lot of the services’ own warehouses to us, as well as responsibility for managing their inventories. We had the first Gulf War and we all remember the mountains of supplies that were left on the battlefield, many unopened—that led to the call for increased asset visibility and improvements in IT systems. During this time we also embarked on use of private sector practices—things like reliance on Prime Vendor support for brand name medical and subsistence items, which we continue to use today. And of course in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the advent of the personal computer and its employment here in the agency helped us a great deal.

We began to get serious about replacing our existing IT system in the later 1990s and early 2000s, implementing an enterprise resource planning system currently called the Enterprise Business System, which we have completely fielded and continue to use as the platform for further improvement. As I mentioned earlier, we also took on increasing responsibilities forward-supporting the warfighters in Iraq and Afghanistan and the maintainers at the services’ industrial sites back home.

Over time, we came from a very modest agency with responsibility for a couple of supply chains to a $46 billion enterprise that is essential to the warfighter around the globe. At this point in our history, we continue to supply about 100 percent of all the fuel, all the medicine, all the food, all of the energy beyond fuel, the uniforms, and the construction and barrier equipment to the services—and roughly 85 percent of the military’s repair parts. Our broad role and long experience in enhancing supply chain efficiency mean it pays to load us up because we are able to get those efficiencies and leverage our buying power and drive down the prices for the military customer.

Q: December 31 is a pretty important date as it relates to our involvement in Iraq—how will DLA be involved in Iraq after December 31?

A: Let me start with our involvement before the December 31 withdrawal target, which is different from those earlier Gulf Wars. We have had staff forward in Iraq and Kuwait for many years, supporting the war effort. Based on this involvement and significant lessons learned from the first Gulf War in the early ’90s, we now engage with our customers to start the planning early, in terms of what the withdrawal will look like and how we can assist with disposal and removal activities and ensure we have just enough supplies available to support the troops as they withdraw. This puts us in lockstep with our customer as they draw down those camps and stations, and we are there helping them sort through whatever it is that they need to dispose of or sell off before we get to the final day. This way U.S. forces are not abandoning materiel in place, but rather being environmentally good stewards and paying attention to all of that before they depart.

After December 31 the Department of State will still have a key role in Iraq and we will continue to support them for food and fuel—we’ve been doing that all along in Iraq. When the decision was made to begin this transition, we quickly partnered with State and have forged a relationship and an agreement that says DLA will continue to support them for what we call Class I, which is subsistence, and for all Class III, which is fuel. It’s done on a reimbursable basis but we are going to keep those contracts in place for their use. We’re thinking this will probably be for a year—the State Department has a plan to pick up that contract mission when we finish. But for 2012 we’ll be providing food to all 13 of their dining facilities and we’ll provide fuel to 11 bulk fuel storage sites, as well as supporting a couple of the airports with into-plane contracts and also doing some disposition services.

Q: Iraq has its challenges in its own ways but Afghanistan, partially because of geography and infrastructure, has issues that are somewhat different. Can you tell me about the Northern Distribution Network, its growth over the past year, and what’s expected of it in the coming 12 months?

A: I would tell you that this Northern Distribution Network idea has been several years in evolution, so I think that your readers know that it is an alternate route into Afghanistan to supplement and balance the sustainment flow with the pak GLOC. It has been very successful because it’s been a coalition of people that wanted to make it so, that coalition of course being the military services, CENTCOM, TRANSCOM and DLA, led overall by CENTCOM and with oversight from the Joint Staff and OSD.

The Northern Distribution Network does give us the capability to move supplies and services into Afghanistan from a northern route, and there are a number of feeder routes into this NDN, but essentially it is an alternate to the paK GLOC. We are continuing to look for ways to be more efficient in our use of it. DLA has been the major contributor to container shipments along the NDN—we account for about 78 percent of the 20-foot containers that are shipped on this route. To date, about 46,000 containers have been shipped on the NDN, and since the inception of this route, about 38 percent of everything we’ve shipped into Afghanistan went in on the NDN. This is important for a number of reasons. There are some supplies that just cannot go into Afghanistan over the northern distribution route, even more so in winter, and so it’s important for DLA to pick up the volume that others aren’t able to put on the NDN, in order to keep the pak GLOC viable for those supplies that can only go that way.

Q: Forces will begin coming out of Afghanistan at some point. How, if at all, will DLA’s role there be different than supporting the drawdown from Iraq?

A: Again, we’re drawing on lessons learned in the early 1990s in Iraq and one of the most important is having a presence from the very beginning. As with Iraq in this past decade, we have had teams embedded with CENTCOM and at forward locations in Afghanistan to support basic supply and selected distribution and disposal services, including for the surge in 2010. In that vein, having our disposition services team there in Afghanistan is very helpful because they can help ensure things that need to be disposed of or somehow dispositioned do not all pile up in the final three months of the conflict—they help execute these actions over a period of time, and so we’ve learned that having those people embedded early gets us ahead of the tsunami of materiel needing disposition when troops withdraw.

As part of this, we also learned from recent years in Iraq that groups which we refer to as EDRTS [expeditionary disposal remediation teams] have been hugely helpful. They are mobile teams that traverse the battlefield and collect up, from the users, any products that are meant to go into disposal. We’re taking the extra step to get out to the forward operating bases in Afghanistan on a regular recurring cycle to visit and collect what they may have so that equipment that the services no longer need for themselves or some form of transfer to the country the U.S. is supporting doesn’t pile up at the end of our deployment there.

We’re also working hard on the front end to work with the services so that we don’t end up with excess inventories of things like spare parts or bulky consumables. The military services—certainly for Afghanistan, the Army and the Marine Corps—are the big players from the perspective of creating the requirement and ordering the product. As their partner we are making sure that we’re keeping an eye on inventory levels since we do manage inventory. This helps ensure we are all on the same page in terms of equipment changeover.

We also work very closely with Transcom to make sure that the necessary transportation requirements are being met, and with the services to ensure the right policies are in place that enable us to get unneeded items out of the country. For example, a lot of what is used is hazardous, and there are international agreements that we have to abide by as we move some of this material. We also go through a decision matrix of what has to be demilitarized before disposition so it does not wind up in the wrong hands. In all, it is a very complex business area—like anything in supply support of forces in Afghanistan, it’s not simple— certainly not like putting your bag of trash out every Sunday evening.

We have a key role in this and so we’re working with our customers to get ahead of the end-state drawdown and start the planning now, and for those things that we can disposition early, to do so.

Q: You mentioned managing inventory and the other services. What is the actual process of coordinating with the service components to come up with the best delivery methods—which route needs to be used to ensure that there’s never a breakdown in those critical supply lines?

A: For overseas support such as in Afghanistan, delivery methods are largely the role of TRANSCOM and, once the items are in-theater, CENTCOM and the military services are involved. But what and how DLA ships from our own warehouses and direct from our vendors has a major role in this. So we partner with SDDC [Military Surface Deployment and Distribution Command], which is a component command of Transcom, as well as with CENTCOM and all the service elements as we walk through this. Ultimately the military services are the requirer and we are responding to their requirement. TRANSCOM builds the transportation network that moves our product for us. We work with the requirer to establish what the requirement is, and then start the planning process of how much inventory we have to move in what period of time. Then together, we work to get to a place where we can move big, heavy, bulky types of product via surface, meaning that we want to get into a rhythm so we’re replenishing bulky, heavy products via ocean transportation and then over land transportation in countries as opposed flying it.

We prefer to use air transportation for emergencies or other unanticipated requirements, and not to use it as sort of our normal mode of moving product around. It has also helped that we have a forward inventory presence in Afghanistan which, although modest, is a footprint nonetheless of some fast-moving items that are forward-positioned.

We also have items stored or accessible in Europe and we use the Europe-to-Afghanistan line of communication to move product from our warehouses there and meet some pretty aggressive turnaround times that way. We’ve been working on this with all the players, including the joint staff and OSD, where we received help on policy changes to make sure that we never have a break in those critical supply lines.

Q: Does DLA, and perhaps the military in general, have the degree of asset visibility that you expected to have at this point in time, and is the current ability to track equipment and supplies meeting your expectations? Finally, how can that ability be improved?

A: This goes back to the first Gulf War when it was recognized that we didn’t have a strong enough asset visibility system in place—and we’ve been working this since in the department. By-and-large, in terms of putting RFID tracking devices on DLA products that are moving into the AOR, we’ve got that down. The challenge is always what is typically called the last tactical mile—once product is in-country and has to then be broken down and re-palletized for onward movement to forward operating bases, this is where we probably don’t have a perfect assettracking system in place across DoD. So I think this is an area we still need to work on.

That said, the TRANSCOM staff has the overall lead in asset visibility and supporting RFID arena, as a part of their role as the department’s distribution process owner. In support of their and the entire department’s efforts, DLA makes it a standard practice that any containers leaving our warehouses, whether they are stateside or overseas, have the appropriate RFID tag on them. The services have invested a lot of money, as have all of us, in instrumenting the various routes so that we are getting the proper ping to be able to track the product. But as I said, the last tactical mile in-country remains a challenge for all of us. When products come in, they go to a theater or consolidation and transshipment point—it gets broken down and then it gets repackaged and that is where we probably are not quite doing as much as we’d like to be able to do with tagging.

However, compared to what I personally witnessed at the end of the first Gulf War, and even how we were doing in the early years in Afghanistan, we have come a very, very long way.

Q: How important are commercial partners to the agency in being able to manage your supply chain from end to end?

A: We could not do the mission without the industry partners. DLA does not make anything, and no one else does in the department, except in rare cases where we’ve got some organic manufacturing capability that is really meant for very specific purposes.

That means we all rely on industry every day to supply the warfighter. For DLA, we started changing our business model in the 1990s to reduce our own and the services’ inventory levels and began embracing best commercial practices like direct “as needed” deliveries via approaches such as Prime Vendor contracts. We used electronic data interchange, RFID and other technologies to make the supply chain more seamless, more responsive and a lot more agile. We have some very strong partnerships with our commercial partners, and the bottom line to all that has been improved customer support at reduced costs.

We also have embarked on agreements called strategic supplier alliances, and we are working with those who are the big dollar value, very critical suppliers to us and our military customers. We have close to 30 of these alliances in place now, with major hardware suppliers for our aviation, land, maritime and other weapons support supply chains. These are very involved, complex agreements that have a lot of metrics associated with them, that we and the supplier sign ourselves up to maintain and watch and work closely to be sure we are delivering the outcome to the customer that they’ve asked for.

Going back to Prime Vendor for a minute—in subsistence and food, our Prime Vendors are critical to keeping the food flowing into Afghanistan. Our Prime Vendor contracts in that AOR are a huge success bringing in commercial product that is flowing into the dining halls. It is a huge morale boost to our troops to be able to go into the feeding facility and enjoy products that they are accustomed to from home.

We have some unbelievable requirements that are levied on our prime vendors like the Thanksgiving meal, the Christmas meal and the Super Bowl Sunday celebrations. The results have been absolutely remarkable.

It is also important to mention our relationships with small business; without them we just couldn’t do what we do. DLA is one of the largest in terms of DoD contracts to small business. They play a huge role in making DLA successful. They affect every aspect of our business, from being support contractors to prime vendors or other big service contracts, to being direct suppliers to a portion of our Class IX spare parts. They play a huge role in our overall business strategy and we always consider the effect on small business as we’re devising new acquisition strategies, because our results here today with them have really been phenomenal.

Q: What challenges do you think DLA will face in light of the anticipated DoD budget cuts and what impacts will that have on DLA support to military services?

A: Certainly like everyone else in the department, I am very concerned about the impact of any cuts on our ability to support the warfighters, as we take our job very seriously and are already focused on never squandering a penny of those taxpayer dollars.

So it is going to be a very difficult challenge to be able to support the warfighter on a reduced budget. That said, there are ways to do this and DLA has a track record of being able to generate efficiencies while remaining effective. That is the real principle here—we want to become more efficient but we cannot risk effectiveness to the warfighter. Things that maybe did not have appeal previously in the realm of efficiencies will probably be revisited by the departmental leadership.

We have a tough job ahead of us but I think we can do this—like all other thing in DoD, it requires some unity of purpose but our track record is strong.

Aside from the budget cuts, there are other challenges that we face. One is the challenge of counterfeit parts, which we are working very aggressively against. We have programs in place to try to root out some of these bad actors, to keep those counterfeit parts out of the supply chain. This will continue to be a challenge moving forward. As part of BRAC [Base Realignment and Closure] 2005, DLA was tasked with directly supplying some of the industrial repair facilities in the U.S. This is new work for us and we have to be able to do that to the level that the services require. We have a similar challenge with our new BRAC-driven role to buy depot level reparables for the services.

We’re going to have challenges keeping the workforce engaged and refreshed with caps on hiring, caps on raises and limits on the amounts of money we can give people in awards—assuming the war fighting support tempo declines as expected, it will then be a challenge to keep people engaged and excited about their work given these limits on compensation.

Having been the CIO here, I also worry a lot about cyber challenges. I am concerned about the threat that these challenges pose. We do a lot of our business over the Internet, and the Internet has been the great equalizer. Most of us thought that the good part of the Internet was that it gave a new and highly useful capability to people regardless of their financial standing; it also gave the capability to bad actors regardless of their financial abilities, so now we have a risk that we did not have 15 years ago. This is a serious risk that we’re going to have to face in spite of the budget cuts.

The bottom line is there are a lot of challenges ahead of us, including certainly those related to expected budget cuts, but I believe that the department is up to the challenge and that we in DLA will figure out ways to help deal with and continue to be as effective as we’ve been in the past.

Q: The Air Force Materiel Command has just announced a significant reorganization of their organization. Could you add some insight as to how that will affect how DLA supports those facilities, especially the air logistics centers—now complexes?

A: It will affect us from the perspective that we were dealing very closely with the Global Logistics Support Center and so the reforming of that capability within the Air Force will probably require a little adjusting on our part.

That said, we’ve worked very closely with the Air Force, Air Force Materiel Command and all of the ALCs. We are going to be able to adjust to meet their requirement, regardless of their organizational structure. It is our intent to work with them to help make their organization as efficient and effective as we can. If there are things that DLA needs to change or to do for them to help them in that regard, we’re ready to do them.

Q: Do you have any closing thoughts on the men and women of DLA and the operations that you manage?

A: My thoughts on the folks that work at DLA are always very positive. I have a long history with the agency—my father worked here, and now I’m here, and so our family goes back to the very beginning of DSA.

This 50th anniversary of DLA gave all of us an opportunity to look back and take stock and to think about where we came from, where we’ve been, the lessons that we’ve learned, and where we should be headed in the future. I see a bright future for the agency because I believe that as operations and support become even more joint, there will be more of a call for organizations like DLA to create more efficiencies, to bring together the requirements of the military services and to deliver them effectively and in a more efficient way.

I think that we have a lot of work ahead of us, but that the outcome will be going in the right direction from a warfighter and a taxpayer perspective. And to refer back to your question, our strength is our people—we’ve got great IT systems, we have some wonderful facilities, we have lots of interesting programs that we’re implementing, but at the end of the day it’s the people.

We are about a 98 percent civilian organization; it is a very dedicated group of people that teams well with the small but strong military cadre assigned to us from the services.

During this last war, many of our civilians deployed into the AOR. Vice Admiral Thompson put a call out for us to supplement the military members in that regard and he was totally overwhelmed by the positive response he received, and we continue to receive. I think that’s just one example of how we have a world-class team of logisticians that continues to grow, evolve and stand ready to take on the next challenges as we go into the future. ♦

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