In plain English, what she wants for DOD and its contractors is clear: complete supply chain visibility.

“At any point in time, we must know where our assets are, who has custody of them, who is accountable for them, how they have been maintained, what they cost and their current value,” says Sumpter, special assistant to the director of Defense procurement and acquisition policy.

Defense Systems editor Dawn S. Onley talks with Sumpter about the status of the Item Unique Identification (IUID) policy, the benefits and challenges of marking, and tracking equipment and other supplies.

DEFENSE SYSTEMS: Describe for me your role and mission.
SUMPTER: My office’s primary role is to work collaboratively with the services and industry to define the policies and ground rules for implementing item unique identification throughout the DOD enterprise and its industrial base.

We worked through issues with the services and industry that are impediments to implementing IUID. This collaboration helped us recognize the speed bumps that we’ve run into and helped to mature the policy. Implementing IUID is a journey, which is still under way. Every three months the policy shifts a bit because we learn more as we gain more experience.

“At the end of the day, DOD does one thing: It delivers people and items for missions, and we must be able to do that quickly and with precision.”

We also do top-level Office of the Secretary of Defense unique ID policy integration. I work with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the personnel and readiness, and the logistics organizations, and, of course, the services. We have a group that gets together ad hoc and formally to discuss policy integration. UID is a system for establishing and maintaining globally unique identification that distinguishes individual people, places, things, programs and organizations.

DEFENSE SYSTEMS: What is the status of the IUID policy?
SUMPTER: It took effect in January 2004 for new acquisitions, and a year later it was amended to include legacy equipment. Every program in DOD must produce, execute and maintain a plan on IUID implementation.

The legacy policy also includes government-furnished property (GFP) because there is a significant amount of DOD-owned equipment in the hands of contractors. Typically, large sole-source contractors have a lot of special tools and test equipment provided by DOD. These items stay in their plants for years to support production. Bell Helicopter and Boeing Corp., at one point, had 10,000 to 20,000 DOD tools for use in aircraft production. Uniquely identifying these tools will enable paperless management of GFP.

The bulk of this GFP task will be done this year. We’re going to a single online system to account for and track government-furnished property in the hands of contractors. This system will be accessible not only to perform government contract administration, but also for use by the responsible contractors. We will be able to view data online and print out consistent reports. Currently, there are about 30 systems in the department that manage GFP.

The IUID registry is the government-furnished property repository. This is where industry benefits dramatically by having only one system of record. They’re going be able to see online the items accountable to and in the stewardship of contractors. This also will enable us to have visibility into the transfer of GFP among contractors and between contactors and DOD.

To get the word out, we engaged the Defense Acquisition University as a full partner because it has campuses and professional instructors all across the country. DAU developed curriculum to train contractors and the department’s personnel. They partnered with us to develop a train-the-trainer curriculum to get professors spooled up. They have a just-in-time group of professors that goes wherever we need on-site training in the country.

We’ve trained more than 15,000 people, at events sponsored by our office, through DAU and through seminars sponsored by the National Defense Industry Association. We’re now doing more workshop-related training to provide people what they need to activate this requirement.

Our outreach efforts have focused on the program management, contracting, logistics, maintenance and engineering communities. We’ve developed a Web-based IUID toolkit. We continue to work with industry to develop training resources.

DEFENSE SYSTEMS: Where do you go from here with IUID?
SUMPTER: Our goal for IUID is to mark 97 million items across the DOD enterprise. The stakeholders are those people involved in acquisition, supply, transportation, maintenance, disposal, property management and financial management. With IUID we’re trying to identify asset accountability.

The broader UID policy evolved from the item traceability piece and is forcing us to understand how we identify organizations, acquisition programs, real property and people—across the department at the broadest level. At the end of the day, DOD does one thing: It delivers people and items for missions, and we must be able to do that quickly and with precision. So the broader IUID implementation has far-reaching implications throughout the DOD enterprise.

There are six UID categories in the overall taxonomy now being worked on: people, things or items, real property (buildings and related infrastructure), weapons acquisition programs (such as Apaches and F-18s), location and organizations.

We already did the people identification piece, through the Common Access Card program, to cleanse personnel data. You might say that IUID is the other 50 percent of the uniqueness equation; now, we’ve got to make sure the item piece is accounted for.

On a strategic level, the Joint Staff issued guidance developed by the Senior Readiness Oversight Council that’s based on lessons learned in Afghanistan, where troops discovered that they could not track mission packages. To support joint forces commanders, we need to assure the smooth flow of material and assets from the point of origin to the war-fighter. We are still operating under the council’s guidance, and that’s the real strategic driver for UID.

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