Reliable communication is essential to answering such questions—as well as helping rescue an enterprise resource planning system that’s struggling to stay afloat. Last year, the Army’s Logistics Modernization Program underwent a senior-level evaluation that looked at program performance and deployment strategy. This year, service and Pentagon brass decided to move oversight and management of LMP to the Army’s Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems.

Despite changes and uncertainties, the LMP team believed the program was vital to the Army’s logistics transformation. So staff members worked on improving it and kept sending Defense Department leaders regular updates.

By talking candidly about the program’s setbacks and how it was addressing them, the LMP team gained converts, says Col. David Coker (see column, Page 8).

While the LMP crew hit the road relaying its message of steady progress, officials working on another ERP initiative, the Defense Logistics Agency’s Business Systems Modernization, were busy rethinking the initial rollout strategy for their effort.

Instead of pushing BSM to users and then layering on capabilities, program leaders decided it made more sense to do the exact opposite: First, reach full functionality, then roll out the system. After some fits and starts, the approach is paying off (see story, Page 20). DLA expects to complete deployment by year’s end and has met its last 16 consecutive rollout goals, says BSM program manager Patricia Whitington.

Whatever strategy you take to improve logistics, at least one senior Defense leader says the department’s Sense and Respond Logistics Concept ought to be part of the mix. “As sense-and-respond emerges, the data standards are becoming more clear,” says deputy undersecretary Paul Brinkley. Read up on the department’s sweeping logistics and supply chain management agenda in our lead feature on Page 14 to see how it will affect your work. Because, like most IT-driven projects that touch warfighters, logistics has become part of the transformation agenda.

DAWN S. ONLEY
Editor
donley@postnewsweektech.com

purchase reprint

link to this page