work of suppliers swung into
action. Within 36 hours, an array of
medical supplies had been delivered
to the Comfort at its berth in
Baltimore. Within 72 hours of its
activation, the ship set sail from
Baltimore. En route south, the vessel
made a call in Norfolk, Va., to pick
up additional crew and supplies.
Within seven days, the ship was
anchored off the coast of Haiti, fully
supplied and staffed and providing
medical care.
As remarkable as that might seem,
it’s hardly a unique occurrence. In
fact, this kind of rapid response is
close to standard operating procedure for the Comfort and its sister
ship, the San Diego-based Mercy.
Thanks to a supply chain strategy
developed over the past decade by
the Defense Logistics Agency
(DLA), the ships are able to move
quickly from a state of “reduced
operations” (skeleton crew, no medicines, limited medical supplies) to
“ready to sail.” The goal is when the
call comes—whether it’s to respond
to a natural disaster or sail to the
Persian Gulf to serve as a floating trauma unit—to be operational within five days. She often does it faster.
PHOTO COURTESY OF U.S. NAVY/JAMES R. STILIPEC
MISSION NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE
To understand the challenges of supplying the Comfort, it
helps to know a little about the scale of the operation. The
vessel, which was converted from a Panamax-class oil
tanker to a Navy hospital ship in 1987, measures nearly 900
feet long and over 100 feet wide—the equivalent of a little
more than two and a half football fields in length and a couple of basketball courts in width. If either the Comfort or
the Mercy were relocated to land, it would make the list of
the 25 largest hospitals in the United States. Send them
together to support a mission, and they jointly are larger
than all but a handful of hospitals in the world.
Supplying any hospital of that size—and doing it on
short notice—might seem supply chain challenge enough.
But in this case, the picture is complicated by the wide vari-
ation in mission profiles. The supplies required by a hospital that’s caring for a military force during wartime are far
different from the supplies needed for a humanitarian mission. Furthermore, not all humanitarian missions are
alike—the medications and supplies needed to treat
patients in the aftermath of an earthquake are not the same
as those needed following a disaster like Hurricane Katrina.
For an example of the difficulty of forecasting supply
needs, you need look no further than the Haitian earthquake. Injuries caused by collapsing buildings and falling
debris led to unusually high demand for orthopedic
devices used for treating traumatic bone fractures, which
normally make up only a fraction of the supplies stocked
by the Comfort. In that case, the DLA processed orders for
more than 1,000 lines of orthopedic items and managed to
have most of them delivered to the Comfort within five
days, either in Baltimore or Norfolk. The remaining items
were flown to the ship in Haiti, using the supplier’s corporate aircraft.
TAKING A DIFFERENT APPROACH
So how do you configure a supply chain network to
respond to the needs of one of the world’s largest hospitals
with no more than five days’ notice of what supplies will be
needed? That’s been the ongoing challenge for the DLA’s
Troop Support organization in Philadelphia and, in particular, its Medical Supply Chain team.
Initially, the group followed standard stocking practice—
that is, buying enough of everything it thought it might
need and putting it on a shelf. Trouble was, that tended to
cost a lot of money. On top of that, shelf inventories, particularly medicines, have expiration issues, and there’s
always the cost of maintaining storage facilities. About 10
years ago, it realized it needed to find a better way.
The task of devising a new process fell to the Medical
Supply Chain team’s Readiness Division. After a thorough
review of the process, the team came up with a whole new
approach to supporting the Comfort. Their strategy?
Deliver readiness, not product.
Essentially, the DLA now contracts with suppliers not for
specific goods, but for a guarantee of the goods’ availability.
In practice, that means that each year, the Readiness
Division invests over $30 million across 59 “contingency
contracts.” For this investment, the DLA receives no product. Instead, it receives a guarantee of five-day availability
(and sometimes faster), on demand, from its network of
commercial suppliers. This investment gives DLA the right
