Requisition Made Easy
Written by John Zhu
MLF 2009 Volume: 3 Issue: 10 (November/December)
Department of Defense Electronic Mall (DoD EMALL), accessible through https://dod-emall.dla.mil, is an Internetbased single entry point to acquire off-the-shelf finished goods and services from the commercial marketplace and government sources. MILSTRIP/ Manual Order Entry System (MOES) is a subsystem of DoD EMALL, accessible through the DoD EMALL home page under Tools tab. As a featured resident of DoD EMALL, MOES was first released in DoD EMALL Release 6.1 on January 1, 2006. Actively used and experiencing steady growth since its first release, MOES’ revenue share in 2009 has reached more than 50 percent of the total revenue of DoD EMALL. Its most recent release is in DoD EMALL Release 9.1 on October 3, 2009.
MOES allows DoD EMALL registered customers to place a requisition, modify a requisition already entered, or access the status of a standing requisition through the World Wide Web. MOES translates the customer entered form-base requisition information into MILSTRIP [Military Standard Requisitioning and Issue Procedures] data to transmit receipt, issue, and adjustment data between inventory managers and stock points.
Built as a J2EE application, MOES was designed and implemented with service-oriented architecture (SOA). Web Services is its fundamental application component. While some of these components are directly used as Web Services to make queries to external systems, others can be readily and easily transformed into Web Services when needed. The advantage of the coupling provided by this SOA architecture has proved the key to not only maintaining but also growing and improving MOES.
Using a framework called XMLBeans, MOES operates on document data rather than the traditional Java objects. These XML documents come from MOES’ base data structure. It is this XML document data structure that provides the necessary infrastructure for easy external system integration, data standardization, and system interoperability.
Indeed, MOES is integrated externally with a number of DLA’s systems including its Enterprise Business System (EBS), which supports DoD’s business enterprise architecture and the Joint Vision 2020 Concept of Focused Logistics, and replaces the Standard Automated Materiel Management System and Defense Integrated Subsistence Management System, two legacy mainframe applications that were essentially impossible to modernize. Being well integrated, MOES also plays a critical role in supporting warfighters around the world with its universal Web accessibility.
MOES allows DoD EMALL customers to access the MILSTRIP requisitioning system through a user-friendly Web interface. This interface follows the well-known MVC (modelview- controller) architecture. It transforms transparently customer- entered form-based information into proper MILSTRIP format represented by XML documents.
MILSTRIP is designed to permit transmission and receipt of requisitions and related documents. An atomic MILSTRIP transaction is specified by an 80-column message. MILSTRIP is the standard for communicating logistics information between DoD and other participating organizations. MOES enables DoD EMALL customers to send requisitions to the MILSTRIP requisitioning system as well as receive status on orders from other DoD information systems external to DoD EMALL.
MOES interacts with a variety of external supply systems. For example, after a customer enters an existing document number, MOES’ view history feature will retrieve the document number’s requisition history for the customer. When entering an A4-Referral Order, customers’ requisition forms will be prepopulated by the information MOES queried from EBS.
For convenience, MOES provides customers with a list of document identifier codes from which customers can select the transaction they require. Customers can either select a specific type of requisition or an exception transaction to process, or even enter a freeform MILSTRIP document from scratch by selecting the “Enter Freeform MILSTRIP” button on the MOES home page.
In addition, MOES provides its customers the capability to bulk upload text files of MILSTRIP requisitions. Customers are reminded that the files they upload are not validated currently. This means that customers need to use proper tools to generate the MILSTRIP files that contain not only the correctly formatted MILSTRIP requisitions but the appropriate distribution code, media status code, or other code to ensure that they receive a status.
If a customer inputs a requisition into MOES and does not fill in all the required fields or enters invalid information, MOES through proper data validation will highlight the fields and prompt the customer to correct the fields. If the requisition rejects at Defense Automatic Addressing System Center, MOES will send a notification with appropriate explanation to the customer.
Customers can check the status of their rejected MOES requisitions by going into MOES and selecting “View Sent Files” and then selecting the “View Response” link to see the reason for the rejection or exception. Customers who submit MOES requisitions will receive a status from the source of supply as well.
Since its first release as part of DoD EMALL in 2006, MOES has evolved with new features and functionalities. For example, bulk upload has expanded into accepting large files of up to 50,000 requisitions. The Demand Data Exchange function was added for collaborative customers to submit their forecasts to DLA through DoD EMALL. Sales reporting has been enhanced to capture all requisitions entered into MOES, whether they are sent from customers’ requisition queue or bulk uploaded. Having become a highly used critical system to DoD EMALL customers including warfighters, MOES will certainly continue to grow as it connects to more external systems, develops new features, handles more requisition types, or increases its usability and processing power. ✯
Dr. John Zhu is a technical director at ICF International, a Fairfax, Va.-based global professional services firm.