Some folks like to describe DLA as the Defense Department’s Wal-Mart, given that it supplies virtually every consumable product to the services—from groceries and medical supplies to jet fuel and toilet paper.

But Patricia Whitington, program manager for DLA’s modernization program, says the analogy is not perfect. Retail outlets annoy their customers if they don’t restock quickly enough. At DLA, shortfalls can result in more severe consequences. “If we can’t supply the military what it needs on time, it can degrade critical aspects of our warfighting capability,” Whitington says

Retail outlets annoy their customers if they don’t restock quickly enough. At DLA, shortfalls can result in more severe consequences. “If we can’t supply the military what it needs on time, it can degrade critical aspects of our warfighting capability,” Whitington says.

DLA is about to wrap up a seven-year, $758 million project to implement an enterprise resource planning system, which includes ERP applications from SAP America Inc. of Newtown Square, Pa., and Manugistics supply-chain software from JDA Software Group Inc. of Scottsdale, Ariz. DLA expects to finish rollout of BSM before year’s end.

DLA initiated BSM as a way to rid itself of the inefficiencies inherent in its patchwork of legacy systems, and it is through cost avoidance that the agency anticipates it will reap the most savings, Whitington says. The agency was supporting six versions of the Standard Automated Materiel Management System, DLA’s primary Cobol-based system, plus the Defense Integrated Subsistence Management System, which controls food items and support. Each of the seven systems had its own IT support team along with sets of processes, business rules, organizational structures and accounting practices—to say nothing of software code.

While this web of systems weighed down DLA operations, customers and suppliers also had the burden of navigating this Rube Goldberg supply chain. “If someone wanted, say, uniforms, they’d have to find their way to the right textile department. Getting there could take 10 calls,” says Jerry Briggs, senior executive vice president for defense logistics at Accenture Ltd., which oversees integration for BSM.

Project with a Past
Replacing the multiple subsystems with a single user-friendly ERP dates back to 1999. DLA was laboring over code fixes for the Year 2000 rollover when its IT team began thinking about ditching the seven stovepipes and implementing an enterprisewide system that would control all processes.

The first phase of BSM, the concept demo, went live in July 2002. Whitington says that unlike many government demo projects, which use dummy data and bare-bones applications, “we made a conscious decision that this would be an actual implementation—in effect the first phase of the rollout.” This initial phase involved about 15 percent of all the items DLA handles, roughly 175,000 repair, food, medical and clothing items—none of them tactically critical. The demo version provided about 75 percent of projected total functionality.

One advantage of a live rollout was that DLA garnered some immediate benefits. The turnaround time for items ordered on the demo list dropped from more than a day to about three hours. By running the application in a live environment, DLA learned some lessons that it then implemented in ensuing rollouts. Many adjustments affected the interface and workflow. In several instances, the agency found it needed to reformat the report-generation application so that users could easily find what they had ordered.

The agency also found that some data in its legacy systems had serious flaws. There were duplicate item numbers and names, for example. So the agency decided that a new major phase of the project would be data cleansing. An arduous and partly manual process, the data cleanup was a must-do before further systems rollouts took place.

Rollout Redux
As a result of the demo, Whitington says, DLA determined that its original strategy, of gradually rolling out the system to more users while simultaneously rolling in more functionality, would be too risky. Instead, it opted to almost complete functionality and then roll in users.

As the project progressed, "almost every job description was up for re-consideration." — Accenture’s Jerry Briggs

The change in deployment strategy, the exigencies of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the need to switch software vendors when it became clear the original application—from American Management Systems Inc. (recently acquired by CGI Group Inc. of Montreal)—would not scale to the requirements, resulted in delays. DLA had set an agressive target completion date of January, which, of course, it missed.

Although the holdups drew criticism from lawmakers and oversight agencies such as the Government Accountability Office, Whitington says DLA executives anticipated and agreed to the delays, which is paying off in the long run. The agency has successfully met its last 16 consecutive rollout goals, she says, and is on target to meet its 17th this month.

BSM now tracks about 3.5 million items. In all, DLA plans for BSM to have 7,000 users from its workforce of 21,100, which is spread across sites in 48 states and 28 countries. The agency manages 26 depots worldwide.

Although antiquated apps fueled the BSM effort, the project also helped DLA overhaul its organizational structure. For one thing, many positions, some of which were rendered redundant by the unified app, were changed. In fact, as the project progressed, “almost every job description was up for reconsideration,” Accenture’s Briggs says. Briggs points out that many of the organizational changes were to make DLA “more customer-facing.” Before the BSM project, the agency was basically an extremely large procurement office, focused primarily on the supply side. Now, it has both a supply and a demand side, he says.

From the perspective of in-house systems users, BSM is less error-prone than the legacy applications. “There is so much more you can do with SAP that was entirely impossible with SAMMS,” says Melvin Croll, an acquisition specialist with DLA’s Aviation Supplier Operations Directorate. The new system also provides a much broader view of orders than did SAMMS, which only displayed small swatches of data at a time. And, because it uses dropdown menus rather than data entry, there’s less chance of entering incorrect numbers, Croll says.

Croll remembers once placing an order in SAMMS for what he thought was an aircraft part, when he actually ordered strawberries because he transposed two numbers. The new ERP sets access rights for DLA users so that they only see dropdown menus linked to their areas of responsibility.

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