Q&A : Lieutenant General Robert T. Dail

LOGISTICS TRANSFORMER:
An Old Saying: Amateurs Talk Tactics, Professionals Talk Logistics



Liuetenant General Robert T. Dail
United States Army
Director, Defense Logistics Agency

Dail has commanded and led logistics and transportation units at every level, from platoon to corps, across the full range of Army combat capabilities. He also has extensive experience in operational and strategic level logistics. Dail’s previous general officer assignments were director of operations, J3, USTRANSCOM, Scott Air Force Base, Ill.; commanding general, U.S. Army Transportation Center, Fort Eustis, Va.; commanding general, 3rd Corps Support Command, Wiesbaden, Germany; and the Director for Logistics-J4, United States Joint Forces Command, Norfolk, Va.

His operational commands include the Division Support Command, 82nd Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, N.C.; the 324th Support Battalion (Forward), 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized), Fort Benning, Ga.; the 598th Transportation Company (Medium Truck), 37th Transportation Group, Mannheim, Germany; and the 309th Transportation Company (Heavy Amphibian), 7th Transportation Group, Fort Eustis, Va. Dail was a charter member of the 75th Ranger Regiment Headquarters staff, serving as the first movement control officer and later as regimental S4. He also served tours as special assistant to the Chief of Staff, United States Army; and executive assistant to the deputy Chief of Staff for logistics, United States Army, the Pentagon.

His early years included duty as a platoon leader, company executive officer; and battalion staff officer at Fort Story, Va.; and duty as a major in the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized), Fort Stewart, Ga., including assignment as S3, 24th Infantry Division Support Command during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

Dail graduated from the University of Richmond in 1975 with a Bachelor of Science degree in business administration. He also holds master’s degrees from Boston University, the National Defense University, and the United States Army Command and General Staff College. His military education includes the transportation officers basic and advanced courses, the United States Army Command and General Staff College, School of Advanced Military Studies and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces.

Dail’s awards and decorations include the Distinguished Service Medal, Defense Superior Service Medal, the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star Medal, the Meritorious Service Medal, the Army Commendation Medal, the Army Achievement Medal, the Ranger Tab, the Master Parachutist Badge, the Australian Parachutist Badge and the Army Staff Identification Badge.

Q: What were your first observations when you arrived at DLA?

A: When I came to the agency about nine months ago, I arrived at an organization that has been evolving since it was created in 1961. It had evolved from a Department of Defense-level agency that is responsible for managing supplies in warehouses, issuing supplies and trying to manage the ‘eaches,’ to an agency that transformed in the 1990s to manage suppliers by instituting programs such as Prime Vendor and strategic supplier alliances, which reap long-term benefits from industrial capabilities for our warfighters This transformation came from our understanding the benefits of long-term contracting relationships. Those relationships proved successful in supporting our work in the Balkans and our initial work in the global war on terror.

When I arrived, the agency was completing and finishing up a major initiative to field DoD’s first large-scale enterprise resource planning business systems management solution, known as Business Systems Modernization. My responsibility now is to take the agency, with its new BSM-based capability, and build on the proud history of its evolution to move it from managing suppliers to linking our supplier network with our warfighting clients’ demand; in other words, more directly linking supply and demand.

That will be my focus over my tenure here at DLA to take our new capabilities and extend them beyond where we have traditionally operated at the wholesale level and move the value far forward to the point of sale, wherever the service and warfighting clients want us to be. Then we’ll link supply with their demand so that we purchase better, we manage better, acquiring exactly what they need, reducing inventory, and providing better support and better value to the department.

Q: What does growth mean to DLA today?

A: We have established and forged strong enterprise relationships with all of the materiel commands and supply commands in the services and we have interagency partnerships established inside and outside the DoD. We are a growing organization and I see growth and development in the future. I think that as we expand missions, that’s how we will grow, initially through roles and personnel aligned with us by the BRAC 2005 decisions, and we will also grow through the services asking us to take on missions that they had traditionally performed. We will grow by extending our systems and our ERP-based solutions to our warfighting clients.

The implementation of this ERP postures us to grow the business and to extend our enterprise. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we will grow large in the number of people, but will grow the business and our capabilities.

Q: When you talk about how DLA has evolved was there any cultural shock or shift for the employees of DLA, or is this where everyone wanted to be but lacked the technology capability to make it happen?

A: The people within the agency who have been here over the course of its continued evolution knew where they were going. They saw what was happening. They saw the potential to further capitalize on technology and find better and more efficient ways to support the warfighter. They knew DLA had to transform.

Transformation’s impact is always easier to assess when you’re looking backwards than when looking forward. When you go through a five-year period, evolving each of those years, and you look back on that period you can really see what a revolutionary time that was!

We have just come through such a revolutionary time, and that required a lot of cultural change in the organization to understand that we were not going to continue running our business units in the same way we had been, where each of our supply centers operated with different processes and tailored systems.

Now that we have all of our business units operating under the same processes and systems, that allows the agency to have tremendous agility to respond to changing requirements by our warfighting clients. It allows us the ability to exercise the unity of command over the actions of the agency which my predecessors did not have available to them.

This workforce and leadership team that had a cultural shift in developing and fielding the ERP solution, can now look to the future and they understand that the next five years are going to be a period of huge transformation as well. We are now able to satisfy additional requirements that the services and the warfighting clients have always wanted us to be able to do.

The BRAC 2005 decisions are one of the mechanisms that we use to move DLA’s extended enterprise into the industrial sites and facilities of the armed forces.

The area that I will target the most for the next five years will be shifting from wholesale supply and item acquisition excellence, which DLA does better today than any entity in DoD, to full supply chain and end-to-end acquisition excellence. This means breaking down barriers that for a variety of reasons have long separated DLA’s wholesale supply support from the customers’ own retail supply operations. Doing so will enable us to enhance end-to-end support while reducing inventories and other investments.

Our people are up to the challenge. Our leadership team has the vision and I am very confident about the future.

Q: You have talked about the cultural shift in the past and alluded to the future. As DLA continues to evolve is DLA where it needs to be from an organizational point of view now or is there a need for more change?

A: It’s going to need to change. For the past five years we have developed a capability in the agency that, when coupled with the BRAC language, allows us to go out and perform missions at industrial facilities that the armed forces operate today. We are already able to begin planning with the services to figure out where the work is going to be accomplished.

Our new capability, with the BSM ERP, allows us now to do work at places where heretofore we’ve not been able to.

When we go to Warner Robins Air Force Base this fall with the United States Air Force to execute BRAC, we will take over and assume their formerly retail supply, storage and distribution mission. That means that we will be able to take DLA’s ERP business systems modernization capability and ultimately place it in the hands of people who used to work for the Air Force and now will work for DLA. The DLA workload that we used to execute solely at Richmond, Va., will now also be accomplished at Warner Robins. The new requirements for analysis and management of industrial activities’ needs that we were not able to do before we had the BSM capability can now be performed at Richmond in collaboration with Warner Robins. So now we will have extended our capabilities down to the service site and have a complete view of the supply chain.

We’ll have to organize ourselves differently. That’s a challenge that all of us eagerly await.

Recently I visited our field facility in Richmond. The workforce is all fired up and very positive about the improvement in support that we will be able to provide at the Warner Robins Air Logistics Center. That’s the kind of excitement that I sense in the agency today. So this is going to be a transformational period of time.

Again the work that we have already accomplished in the last four or five years and the BRAC decisions will allow us to extend our enterprise far forward with the respective services.

Q: You have talked about supply chain excellence and being the link right down to the warfighter level; what systems do you have in place that allow your customers to access DLA-managed items, data, information, and are you satisfied with these systems? What enhancements are you most interested in seeing in the short term?

A: I’ll mention three systems right off the bat that we can place in the hands of our warfighting clients or our newly acquired workforce and at some of these far-forward locations.

Our customers already have a variety of ways to access DLA items and information. They can do this through long-established automated or telephonic means, or by using the relatively recent DoD EMALL system. EMALL provides a user-friendly, electronic commerce-based system to locate, order and pay for requirements directly from numerous vendor catalogs or from items stocked by DLA. So I am mentioning EMALL first since it is already available to our customers and we will continue to help them leverage it.

Second is the Distribution Standards System. Although not a part of our BSM ERP, it is a national system that was developed by the Defense Logistics Agency to manage and execute our global defense distribution system. Today, that system stops at our distribution centers. In the future when we go and execute BRAC at Warner Robins, we will assume responsibility for managing the supply and storage mission that services used to own. By extending our DSS to industrial sites’ own warehouses and picking up visibility of those stocks, we will be able to reduce our purchases in the agency yet give the same or better level of performance with greater efficiency to the department.

The third system is our business systems modernization capabilities. This is the ERP I have been discussing that allows us to determine requirements for and procure items and, in company with DSS, to manage the overall supply process. We are looking forward to the civilian workforce that will come to DLA, and arming them with this capability, which will allow us to buy things at the point of effect instead of having them bought centrally back at a DLA supply center. And when it makes sense to buy something very quickly, we will now have visibility of those purchases. In the past we have not had that visibility of purchases by the services that met their short-term requirements.

With regard to further enhancements, there is a fourth capability that we are developing today. Mae De Vincentis, the DLA chief information officer, and her staff are partnering with U.S. Transportation Command to provide a capability for our warfighting clients to access status of stocks and materials and the movement of those stocks and materials to their locations. We are merging TRANSCOM’s of the Global Transportation Network (GTN) and DLA’s asset visibility that is in our Integrated Data Environment initiative.

GTN is USTRANCOM information technology system that provides in-transit visibility. DLA’s asset visibility capability offers some in-transit information and also allows our clients to look at stock status—where is it located and how much is located where. We began this merger last summer under the oversight of General Norton A. Schwartz, commander U.S. Transportation Command and me.

Our first rollout of capability will be this summer, and it will demonstrate that we can track motor carrier performance in the continental United States—motor carriers that are delivering materiel from warehouse locations to warfighting client locations. We will be able to track that within a common operating picture that is jointly funded by U.S. Transportation Command and DLA.

We are very excited about this. Not only will we be able to arm our customers in the future with the first two systems, but now, just like a UPS or Fed Ex customer, we will give them a single integrated tool to track the activity that we are executing in support of them. I think this will build our warfighting clients’ trust and confidence in our support of the operational arena and their missions, and give them confidence to pursue other initiatives with us.

Q: Are the requirements of DLA/TRANSCOM so divergent from what is commercially available—you mention UPS and Fed Ex? Are you able to partner with industry and take their tracking and asset management systems, or are you having to develop new systems that meet the specific requirements of the military user?

A: Let me answer this way. I came from U.S. Transportation Command and I think that my arrival here was a reinforcement of DoD’s view that this agency, DLA and the combatant command, TRANSCOM, should be closely connected.

I want to immediately add that we are both already partnered with industry. At TRANSCOM, 90 percent their mission is accomplished from industry capacity. In other words, TRANSCOM links the commercial transportation industry of the U.S. with the armed forces.

Well, DLA is very similar. What DLA does is link our industry sources, including small businesses of America—in support of providing for the U.S. military.

So first, creating a single system to track in-transit and asset visibility allows both of us to rely on our strong relationship with our industry partners. Our ERP mostly uses commercial off-the-shelf software and thus is very similar to that used in the private sector.

Second, we are both committed to forging a strong relationship with each other so that we can develop a command-and-control system and information technology capability that allow our warfighting clients to have better access and visibility into the great capacity of U.S. industry.

Q: What are the next steps in further maturing the DLA/TRANSCOM relationship?

A: To reinforce this relationship, we have a couple of initiatives. The first we have already talked about regarding the merger of the Global Transportation Network with the asset visibility capability.

A second is the work we are executing together for joint regional management capability in Oahu, Hawaii. Today on the island of Oahu, we have all four services represented: the Marine Corps at Kaneohe; the Army at Schofield Barracks; the Navy at Pearl Harbor and the Air Force at Hickham Air Force Base. TRANSCOM, under its distribution process ownership leadership for DoD, has asked DLA to present a plan that would provide for one single distribution hub where we would store materiel required to support all four services on the island and then link with a single transportation capability to deliver those stocks and materiel to each of those four locations—multiple times each day.

We are presenting that plan to the DoD in late spring and our intention is to begin execution of that plan in FY08. I think that this is a tremendous partnership that TRANSCOM and DLA have undertaken to demonstrate how much we can improve performance and yet conserve precious resources.

This is just another example of the kind of improvement—the best value—that can occur when TRANSCOM, under its DPO leadership role, and DLA with its capabilities can produce when we work together.

I will also tell you that DLA continues to support Transportation Command joint deployment and distribution operations center capabilities which it deploys around the globe in support of all the combatant commands. They have the capability to synchronize movements of forces and material around the world, and we are an integral part of that capability. Those are the kinds of initiatives and capabilities that result from a strong partnership between TRANSCOM and DLA.

Q: What is DLA doing to extend its logistics enterprise farther forward in the supply chain? Are there any other specific programs that you care to detail for this effort?

A: I want to reinforce that we just completed a great effort to field an ERP solution and we are about to embark on BRAC implementation which will drive us deeply into directly supporting the industrial facilities of the U.S. military services.

We will also execute the Joint Regional Material Management capability in Oahu. Once we complete that effort, our intent is to move that capability to Europe to execute in calendar year 2008. If we can execute those missions and demonstrate improved performance—and I have no doubt that we will—we will prove to the services that they will get better performance out of all of this.

Q: Are there any specific technology items such as computers, software, automatic tracking devices, that you have had success with or that you would like to let industry know that you could use their assistance in filling a need?

A: I think the one comment that I would make would be in the area of radio frequency identification technology. There is a suite of these automatic identification technologies—everything from two-dimensional bar codes, to satellite tags that we can place on sensitive containers and equipment that we always want to maintain visibility over, to active radio identification tags on large shipping pallets and containers, to passive radio identification tags that you can place on smaller cases and items.

We are partnered with U.S. Transportation Command in this regard. Recently the DoD assigned the TRANSCOM commander the responsibility of integrating automatic identification technology into the DoD.

With TRANSCOM, we are embarked on a joint effort to demonstrate a concept of operations that involves both active and passive radio frequency identification technology to support military forces in Alaska from the west coast distribution center and west coast ports of embarkation, through ports of debarkation in Alaska to the military installations. We are merging data from active RFID tags for asset visibility, and we have placed passive RFID equipment and software at the sites in Alaska and at Travis Air Force Base. By the end of this summer, we hope to demonstrate that there is better value, better visibility and better decision-making by logistics leaders when they have an instrumented and standard concept of operations in place using automatic identification technology.

The message to industry would be that in the future, besides relying on them for continued enhancements to cybersecurity and to the capabilities embedded in business sytems, we expect to exploit every automatic identification technology capability in the visibility toolkit.

The message to our services customers is, by implementing this concept of operation, your decision-making, your ability to demonstrate agility, the ability of your operating forces—the warfighters—to have confidence and trust in the DoD supply chain will be much improved with this concept of operations being developed by DLA and TRANSCOM.

Q: What other role will BRAC play as it relates to DLA and its transformation?

A: Warner Robins is just the start. We will follow Warner Robins by going to Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma City, Okla., and then on to Hill Air Force Base, Ogden, Utah, in FY08. The naval depot at Jacksonville, Fla., will follow later in FY08.

There are a couple of things about BRAC that I would like to underscore. BRAC language says that DLA will privatize tire supply support through our supplier network—aviation tires as well as ground combat systems tires. We awarded a contract to Michelin early this year that will allow us to take advantage of its global distribution network to accommodate the requirements of our warfighting clients. In return, that frees up a lot of warehouse space that was devoted to tires.

We are also privatizing, as part of BRAC, support of packaged petroleum, oils and lubricants and that will have the same benefits to us as tires will have. It will allow us to take advantage of an established distribution network from our supplier alliance, and help reduce the government-owned warehouse requirement that we maintain today.

Finally, we will privatize support of industrial gases needed by the military.

We expect to have all three of these contracts in place this year. What you will see is that DLA will manage its supply network through contracts that will then link that supplier to the warfighting client demand at the point of sale. This will be better value for the client, for DoD and for the people of this nation.

This is another example of how DLA’s business will grow but not necessarily by the increasing number of people needed at DLA.

Q: Is there anything else you would like to add?

A: DLA’s senior leadership and I fully understand that we are constantly evolving from the days as a supply manager to where we managed a suppliers’ network to today where, armed with this new capability called business systems modernization, we are moving forward and extending our enterprise. This enterprise comprised of DLA, its partners in the services, the services’ materiel and supply commands, and USTRANSCOM is ready to be extended far forward to link our supplier network with our client demand.

I am always asked, as the new agency director, how confident are you that you can integrate this new acquired workforce that you are going to get from BRAC? I think Mae De Vincentis said it as well as anybody when we were discussing this at a recent DLA’s commander’s call. She said that DLA’s evolution over the last 40 years has been built upon the integration of new capabilities and logistics support professionals that came to DLA from the services whenever DLA was tasked with additional missions over those years. It demonstrates our great agility by constantly integrating these new capabilities and professionals to continually evolve the agency and improve support.

BRAC presents these same opportunities to integrate tremendous professionals from the services into the agency who will break the walls down between wholesale and retail and allow us to focus on the entire supply chain and provide better service It’s an exciting time to be at DLA! ♦