AT-21

Written by Michael Burnett

U.S. Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) acts as the supply chain manager for the entire Department of Defense, as it holds responsibility for deployment and distribution solutions across air, land and sea.

USTRANSCOM controls 87 ships, 1,269 aircraft and 2,150 railcars and related equipment to move packages and cargo around the globe. Those assets move more than 590,000 people and more than 640,000 tons of material annually between 768 origin points and 826 destinations through 331 ports of embarkation and 314 ports of debarkation, according to USTRANSCOM figures.

Unfortunately, despite a reputation for world-class information technology at DoD, USTRANSCOM has fallen far behind in supply chain information systems.

“We know that we are years behind in the DoD as far as managing supply chain operations,” confessed Larry Jameson, deputy for programs and readiness within the USTRANSCOM Operations Directorate. “We want to transform our business processes for deployment and distribution.” So USTRANSCOM is turning to industry to tackle the challenge with a solicitation to award a program called Agile Transportation for the 21st Century (AT-21). Jameson estimated that the resulting supply chain management system would handle more than 4 million transactions a day.

“We are a very big business obviously supporting forces around the globe,” Jameson told Military Logistics Forum. “We deploy the U.S. forces where they need to be to perform this nation’s business. We then move the sustainment to keep those forces operating. We move patients to where they need to be. We move senior leaders around to where they need to be. “The majority of the data is really focused on the deployment of the forces and the sustainment data that would continue to follow and sustain them wherever they may be located,” he continued. “That includes food, repair parts, replacement vehicles—whatever is required. It is more incredible to think that about 80-90 percent of that is done manually today.”

The recognition that the manual work performed by USTRANSCOM was overdue for automation was emphasized by an advanced concept technology demonstration (ACTD) USTRANSCOM held in partnership with U.S. Central Command and the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) from 2003 to 2005.

“We demonstrated military utility in using commercial supply chain management products and best practices for our defense transportation system of operations,” Jameson noted. The ACTD also resulted in the beginning of the use of a tool called TransViz to provide joint time-phased force and deployment data visualization and analysis. USTRANSCOM recognized that such a tool was an interim solution at best and began the work of reorganizing its business practices with the goal of implementing AT-21.

“We are looking at a complete transformation of our business processes,” Jameson commented. “We have started some of those that will streamline and automate our manual processes today to support the transportation planning and execution and provide visibility to the process and information flow from many disparate legacy transportation systems. We would want the entire deployment and distribution enterprise worldwide to operate from AT-21. So that would be not only us as a supporting combatant command but also the supported combatant commands around the world.”

Insofar as USTRANSCOM is concerned, that effort would provide a state-of-the-art agile transportation information system to the total authorized USTRANSCOM force of 155,794 personnel (including active duty, Reserves and civilians).

Contract Details

AT-21 must be an agile system indeed, able to process orders and move assets rapidly, while providing visibility into the dense data resources of USTRANSCOM customers and partners. Because AT-21 could prove tremendously challenging for a contractor team, USTRANSCOM has broken it into three increments—each of which will have a separate competition—over a 10-year period.

The first increment will involve the consolidation of requirements across the USTRANSCOM enterprise and establish a workflow to meet those requirements. The second increment will involve strategic-level optimization and scheduling for USTRANSCOM activities. Finally, the third increment will involve operational-level optimization and scheduling. USTRANSCOM estimates that each increment should take about 3 years to complete with a 1-year support period to ensure the transition of USTRANSCOM operations and maintenance.

“During that 10-year time frame, we are looking for change management, business process reengineering, applying the best practices and continuous product and process improvement from commercial industry,” Jameson explained. “We are looking at commercial off-the-shelf order management and transportation management tool suites and then, to complete the process, the implementation of performance metrics so that we are ensuring the best possible support to the supported combatant commanders.

“This is the year of metrics at United States Transportation Command. We are looking at all of our performance under metrics. We know that AT-21 will move us exponentially in our ability to provide the best support possible,” he added.

The incumbent for the first increment of the AT-21 contract could compete for the second increment and so on.

“It gives us the opportunity to ensure that we are getting the best possible performance from the contract or contracts so that we can achieve our objectives,” Jameson stated. USTRANSCOM began the process of contract award with a release of a request for information in April 2005. The RFI examined industry products and capabilities available to assist USTRANSCOM. A draft request for proposals (RFP) was released in October 2006, and a final RFP followed in March 2007. Jameson anticipates a contract award late in the summer of this year.

Work under AT-21 would commence immediately, with USTRANSOM expecting four to six spiral capability and process releases during each of the three 3-year increments.

“The scope of this effort will be to identify and implement business processes and systems that enable the DoD’s distribution planning, transportation planning and transportation execution activities in support of the Joint Deployment Distribution Enterprise business enterprise,” reads the AT-21 RFP, located online at www.fedbizopps.gov. “This effort will apply best business practices and leverage order management and transportation management technologies within a three-phased incremental acquisition.

“The effort will focus less on capturing the ‘as-is’ processes and more on providing a solution ‘blueprint’ that best meets the program objectives [mission capability and performance], addressing and integrating the myriad enterprisewide elements including: organization, culture, personnel competency, business processes, facilities and assets, and enabling information technology. The ultimate solution shall define and enable end-to-end integrated processes to achieve transformational impact, rather than applying technology to existing processes for incremental improvement,” it adds.

The end result is a “modern enterprise business system” that reengineers USTRANSCOM distribution planning, transportation planning and transportation execution; enhances supply chain capabilities; and achieves item visibility throughout the supply chain. As USTRANSCOM is in the process of source selection for the contract award, Jameson would not speculate on what sort of company might win, but he did say that it should be a top supply chain management company or information technology company.

“This has been a long time coming and now that we are in source selection, it is starting to feel real,” he stated. “We at United States Transportation Command are not the ones who will benefit from this, but rather it will be the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines that are out there at the point of the spear for the nation doing our nation’s work.”

Quick and Flexible

A number of large companies have submitted proposals in response to the RFP. One corporation that has been very active with agile transportation systems is EDS Corp. of Plano, Texas. Barry Ptashkin, vice president and client industry executive of the EDS Government Transportation Sector, told MLF that his company has significant experience implementing agile transportation systems for clients that must move materials quickly. Ptashkin walked MLF through the hallmarks of a good agile transportation system.

“The concept of an agile platform is one that enables quick, flexible response to incidents that might be either operational, security, or emergency based,” Ptashkin described. “The technology underneath that would deal with the communications and network capabilities, the middleware capabilities, the user-facing capabilities.”

“We are particularly concerned with what is available to a user that may not be a technology person but rather an operational fellow. What is it that would provide adequate visibility that he or she may be able to respond to an incident or a predicted incident in an orderly fashion and be able to respond and mobilize national or other resources?” he asked rhetorically.

The system must meet the needs of operators who sense and then respond to a need. It must account for the type of event that has occurred, Ptashkin elaborated. Such an event could range from a derailment of a railcar or the leakage of hazardous material from a tanker. Emergency events also would include movement by enemy forces or a smaller set of bad guys to harm military or civilian people.

Agile transportation systems must provide visibility across the systems that would detect and respond to those events, Ptashkin said, and EDS has done a lot of work in the area of providing visibility of data across disparate sources. EDS continues to examine the challenges confronting users of agile transportation systems, he added.

“For the same kind of sense, respond and recover capability—which is really the concern in the case of a national event of any kind—there is broad need for that visibility and again for joint visibility of both civilian and defense agencies,” Ptashkin concluded. “So how do the National Guard and the Red Cross get things done at the local level and how do we mobilize DLA and TRANSCOM? What’s the role of FEMA and DLT regarding that? How does each of those agencies have visibility into its own operation or its partner operation or its team operation with, for example, FEMA in the case of a national disaster?”

Commercial Enterprise

A group of small businesses have banded together to compete for the AT-21 using the systems of software giant SAP as their product offering, Michael Young, director of business development for DoD at SAP Public Services Inc., based in Washington, D.C., told MLF. Young declined to identify the contract team.

He framed the challenges facing USTRANSCOM as similar to those that faced large commercial shipping businesses in the paste.

“About 15 years ago, FedEx and UPS were basically transportation providers,” Young commented. “But market forces were asking them to do more than move the stuff. They wanted a full end-to-end supply chain capability. They also wanted it on more than one mode. They didn't want to go to eight or nine vendors to get something from point A to point B. They went out and started buying niche companies to provide services and they built systems around it to provide the end-to-end capability.”

“USTRANSCOM has effectively been given this task under a DoD directive that told them they would be the distribution process owner for the Defense Department. That took place about three years ago,” he added.

Now USTRANSCOM must pull together a number of logistics systems throughout the Defense Department and make them operate throughout the Defense Transportation System. “AT-21 is the key piece of their transformation from a transportation provider to a provider of supply chain end-to-end support,” Young noted. “If you look at it from a customer perspective, the combatant commands are looking for TRANSCOM to provide them an end-to-end view. TRANSCOM doesn’t own the supply end of this picture. The supply end is what generates the movement requirement. The result then is that they have to collaborate the providers of supplies in the Defense Department, the largest of which is the Defense Logistics Agency [DLA].”

In addition to DLA, each of the services has supply activities. USTRANSCOM must now pull information from all such sources and provide visibility across the entire supply chain. USTRANSCOM first attempted to do this in the 1990s with the Global Transportation Network (GTN), which it still operates, Young explained, but GTN depends on systems that do not provide it with quality data. That’s why the first increment of AT-21 focuses heavily on gathering the data feeds required to build a state-of-the-art agile transportation system. The challenges facing USTRANSCOM are very similar to those facing any large commercial enterprise in this regard, Young observed. He estimated that about 95 percent of TRANSCOM activity involves movement by commercial means. And SAP is well positioned to assist in those challenges partly because its system is already the system of choice at DLA, Navy Supply Command, Army Materiel Command, Army Medical Materiel Command and others. But Young acknowledged that USTRANSCOM deals with certain situations that commercial enterprises do not.

“USTRANSCOM owns and operates transportation assets for the express purpose of being able to project power anywhere in the world, based on whatever the president’s policy is. With that comes an overhead that you don’t have in the commercial sector,” Young emphasized. “So when you sit down and try to optimize certain things, sometimes the priorities of the world eliminate optimization simply because the urgency and need is such that you will do what you need to do to get the job done. That certainly happens in the commercial world, but not to the extent that you see it in the military world.” ♦

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