Following are additional questions and answers from an interview with LeAntha D. Sumpter, special assistant to the director of Defense procurement and acquisition policy, that appeared in the September/October issue of DEFENSE SYSTEMS. Editor Dawn S. Onley talked with Sumpter about how the Defense Department is working to improve logistics and supply chain management.

DEFENSE SYSTEMS: What are some of your goals this year?
SUMPTER: Successful implementation of the paperless GFP initiative, which is getting industry to enter into the IUID registry all existing property in the hands of contractors.

In a war environment, there are a number of niche vendors, and it will take awhile to penetrate these niches. It’s helpful to talk to industry about how much money they can make by implementing IUID on GFP. Many of the DOD integrators are now building their own GFP registries.

This is a great opportunity. All these companies are products of several legacy companies who never reinvented how they managed GFP. For instance, Lockheed Martin Corp. had several approaches throughout its enterprise and now is going to a single approach. Although it had to make an initial investment, Lockheed is now reaping some benefits.

DEFENSE SYSTEMS: Describe the Wide Area Workflow initiative.
SUMPTER: WAWF was originally intended to be—very simplistically—the digital receipts and invoicing system for the department.

Companies create a digital-receiving document and, once approved by the government, they can use the document to submit invoices digitally. Before WAWF, the government was consistently unreliable about making payments in a timely fashion. WAWF eliminates ambiguity and provides enhanced traceability for invoice payments.

The workflow tool allows industry to use electronic funds transfers and flat files. Basically, it routes the electronic invoice to the government receiver. Because it’s a workflow, the contractor who created the document can see where it is at all times.

What we did is to build IUID into this workflow tool. Now we can capture, coincident with item delivery, the data on an infinite number of IUIDs.

Property accountability is established when an item is received by its user. They typically uncrate items to find their part and serial numbers, and then type the numbers into data entry systems. With IUID-marked items, the identifying information can be scanned electronically into data systems. We found that there are multiple processes and automated systems with all of this data as we examined our property systems, but WAWF will facilitate connecting the processes.

The cost to hook up to these systems is not a lot of money. It’s a mapping exercise, which enables an electronic data exchange from one system to the next.

DEFENSE SYSTEMS: What are some of the benefits of having IUID? Do you have any metrics that show that IUID saves money and/or time? How does its use differ from the previous process?
SUMPTER: Before IUID, item identification was done using manual data capture and data entry. Manual data collection methods are slow, costly and introduce errors that clearly contribute to inaccuracy in item traceability.

One industry case showed that retail businesses spend 18 to 20 percent of their supply chain operations in inefficient material handling and identification of items—ordering, shipping and repairing the wrong things. It’s a pretty big target. Rolls Royce conducted an analysis that concluded that 4 percent of its direct labor costs in aerospace engine manufacturing could be eliminated by using IUID.

The Air Force is now looking at the reliability enhancements on 300 bad-actor components. The service found it was repairing these inherently bad parts over and over, and then shipping them back and forth between the field and the depots. The Air Force has seven pilots running in its depots, and we expect these PathFinder pilots to produce many good results, which the Air Force will then share with the other services. The Army is also conducting pilots; the Navy is only now beginning to make some progress.

It generally takes five to seven years to make a systemic change throughout the department. We are using a mandatory contract clause to enforce this change.

DEFENSE SYSTEMS: What have been some of your key challenges in getting Defense organizations and contractors to implement the IUID policy?
SUMPTER: A key challenge is trying to bridge different functional communities that are not accustomed to dealing with one another. Everyone is accustomed to dealing with what they do best. The biggest problem has been getting people to look beyond their specific functional areas and approach this holistically.

IUID is feasible; it’s not rocket science. We have found that getting even a few people to take the lead and lean forward converts some of the less enthusiastic stakeholders.

DEFENSE SYSTEMS: Can you explain the differences between RFID and IUID?
SUMPTER: IUID is not a tag; it’s a data matrix bar code physically placed on an item. An RFID tag, whether active or passive, is a tag attached to a shipping container or item. For example, let’s say we have 50 parts with IUID marks and they’re all delivered from the contractor in one container. On the contractor’s receiving report, each of the IUIDs would be listed individually, and the RFID tag number attached to the container would also be listed.

The individual items in the container have IUIDs—whether they are labels, plates or direct part marks. IUID marks must permanently stay on the actual items.

RFID is a radio transmission capability that can be read as the container transits the supply chain. It is tracked in the transportation system by nodes, satellites or on the ground. At any point in time, we can determine where the container is. Because the database tells us where the container’s IUID items are, we know where the assets are.

We are only tagging cases, pallets and shipping containers with RFID tags at this point. For example, an RFID tag would not be on each meal-ready-to-eat pouch, but instead on the case and/or pallet of MREs and on the outside of the shipping container.

RFID and IUID go together. They are complementary data structures.

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