and the largest distribution depot
operated by the Department of
Defense. It sprawls over 380 acres,
split between two locations near
Harrisburg, providing military and
commercial repair parts, clothing
and textiles, medical supplies, and
industrial and electronic compo-
nents to military customers
throughout the United States and
around the world. DDSP has over
$10 billion worth of inventory on
the shelf, with more than 870,000
unique items in stock spread across
over 1 million storage locations.
Compare that to Wal-Mart, which
Kai zen
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Murata Machinery USA, Inc.
Logistics & Automation Division
2120 Queen City Drive 120 N Redwood Rd, Suite 3
Charlotte, NC 28208 North Salt Lake, U T 84054
www.muratec-usa.com
800.428.8469
systemwide handles on the order of
120,000 SKUs.
DDSP, with more than 3,700 military
and civilian employees, is the largest of
the 25 distribution centers operated by
DLA both here and abroad, and it supports a customer base that includes units
in Europe, Africa, Central and South
America, Southwest Asia, and the eastern
half of the United States. The facility
houses 9. 4 million square feet of covered
storage spread across 58 warehouses, with
the largest building, the Eastern
Distribution Center, providing 1. 7 million square feet alone.
In short, it is a distribution goliath,
shipping billions of dollars of supplies to
locations around the world every year.
And it has one customer: the U.S. military. Crucially, it is the DC supporting
operations in Southwest Asia, where the
United States continues to fight wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan.
That knowledge makes employees at
the facility— 40 percent of whom are
veterans—take their jobs very seriously.
As you might expect, the relationship
between workers and management in
the unionized facility is different from
what might be found in DCs in the private sector. The same might be said of
the employees’ attitude toward their
work.
Take Bob Keeney, supply specialist and
former vice president of Local 2004 of the
American Federation of Government
Employees, AFL-CIO, for example.
Keeney, a military veteran like so many of
his peers, has been in the warehouse for
32 years. His father-in-law came back
from Korea and went to work there, and
Keeney did the same thing when he got
out of the Navy in 1974. His particular
expertise is in the nasty stuff that moves
through a military warehouse: explosives,
radioactive materials, fumicides, and
other sorts of ugly things.
While talking, he suggests that we shift
the conversation after hours to a bar
called Julie’s near the DC, and he offers to
buy me a beer. He is dressed in a T-shirt
and jeans; the handiwork of tattoo artists
adorns both arms.
We get on the topic of continuous
improvement and DDSP’s current lean
