thoughtleaders VICE ADMIRAL AL THOMPSON
QCan you talk a little bit about crossover between commercial
best practices and DLA’s operations?
ADLA is a huge global enterprise, but our top priority is effectiveness. Having said
that, another very
important responsibility is stewardship
of the taxpayer’s dollar. We are true
believers that we
need to be on a
never-ending quest
to be as efficient as
we can possibly be
because the taxpayers shouldn’t pay a
penny more for the product that we
provide than is absolutely necessary.
In my Director’s Guidance for
2009 [a document similar to a corporation’s strategic plan], we established four strategic focus areas:
warfighter support, work-force
development, stewardship improvements, and business process
enhancements. The top one, of
course, is warfighter support
enhancements, which is really about
effectiveness. The
work-force development area is focused
on retaining and
recruiting the work
force of the future
and doing the necessary core development work to be as
relevant to America’s
armed forces in the
future as we are
today. Stewardship
improvements and business process
enhancements are related to continuously improving the business at
DLA. There is a lot of crossover to
industry best practices when you
look at our supply chain management and distribution roles.
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QCan you expand on how you have approached the challenge of adopting commercial best practices?
AA critical enabler to importing com- mercial best practices into DLA has
been our information technology investments over the last decade. We have our
enterprise business system that began as an
ERP implementation but now is broader.
We are continuing to build on that with a
couple of big additions. There is a module
called e-procurement, where we are in
effect the Defense Department’s leader in
bringing this contracting capability into
the DOD in place of a legacy system that
was government-unique. We are also
expanding the enterprise business system
to cover the energy segment, replacing a lot
of different legacy systems.
There are also other things that have
occurred over the last few years: the focus on
performance-based contracts and prime
vendor arrangements, particularly in the area
of troop support. But we also have several
now in the hardware area, which allows us to
manage suppliers instead of supplies. We are
always looking for opportunities to rapidly
import commercial best practices, recognizing that when the day is over, we are about
effectiveness and we have to get the balance
right between effectiveness and efficiency.
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QIs there anything we haven’t talked about yet that you might like to add?
AJust being back in the agency for a few months, I am struck by several things.
We have a world-class human capital
organization, very well postured to refresh
our work force over the next decade. We
will see increasing attrition over the next 10
to 15 years, but I feel very comfortable that
we’ve got all the right programs in place to
replenish the DLA work force in the future
with one that is even more capable than
what we have today.
I know the term “transformation” is probably overused, but I believe that any large,
complex global logistics organization like
DLA needs to constantly be transforming
itself. A lot of the experience that we’re gaining from this close association with the forces
in the field will help us continue to transform
DLA to be as relevant in the future as we are
today and to continue to enhance the level of
support that we are providing. ;
