to quick-turn delivery for almost $700
million worth of medical products.
In financial terms, what the division
gets for its $30 million is a call option. It
has the right to exercise a delivery contract
and pay for the items, using pre-negotiat-
ed unit pricing, at the time of delivery. Or
as Mike Medora, chief of the Troop
Support medical contingency contracting
team, puts it, “We pay for access to the
material.”
Another way to look at it is that for its
annual $30 million, DLA Troop Support is
able to tap the most sophisticated medical
supply chain in the world, on demand.
The DLA never even touches the material.
Suppliers are responsible for everything
from product freshness to storage, and
because they deliver directly to the
Comfort and the Mercy, the agency doesn’t
even have to maintain its own distribution
network.
Take pharmaceuticals, for example. The
DLA has a prime vendor contract with
Cardinal Health, under which Cardinal
agrees to make available within 72 hours a
specified list of pharmaceutical products
to support a 1,000-bed activation. When it
needs to supply the Comfort, Cardinal
simply draws on the resources of its 23-
center distribution network, according to
Theo Wilson, Cardinal Health’s vice president of government sales. “We can move
product around to support any activation,” he says.
Meeting the DLA’s fast-turnaround requirement can be
challenging, Wilson admits. But workers need little encour-
agement once they learn where the orders are headed, he
says. “It’s not hard to motivate people to get it done.”
It also helps that Cardinal has a distribution center not
far from the Comfort’s berth in Baltimore. “After Katrina, we
didn’t wait the 72 hours that DLA gives us,” Wilson says.
“We had product there in 24 hours.”
Comfort at sea
The Comfort has been busy over the past decade. On the afternoon of
Sept. 11, 2001, the Comfort was activated in response to the attack on
the World Trade Center, arriving pier side in Manhattan on Sept. 14.
Since then, it has embarked on a variety of missions:
▪ In June of 2003, the Comfort deployed to the Persian Gulf in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
▪ On Sept. 2, 2005, after only two days of preparation, the Comfort
sailed to assist in Gulf Coast recovery efforts after the devastation of
Hurricane Katrina.
▪ On Jan. 13, 2010, the Comfort was ordered to assist in the humanitarian relief efforts following the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
▪ In March 2011, the Comfort set sail on a five-month goodwill mission to the Caribbean, Central America, and South America.
PLAN AND ADJUST
Along with rethinking the nature of the contracts it places
with commercial suppliers, DLA Troop Support’s Readiness
Division is redefining its own business processes to boost preparedness. For example, it has compiled a cross-referenced list
of standard-use medical items from all the services. It has also
upgraded its computer systems so that orders can flow without human intervention directly to the suppliers.
That list of “standard” items grows almost daily. The
number of surgical items in the catalog is approaching
75,000 SKUs, including almost 2,000 pharmaceutical items.
To put these numbers in perspective, a typical supermarket
assortment is about 40,000 items. The catalog has devel-
oped over time based on experience across the military.
“We’ve been working with the military services for years,”
says Linda Grugan, a contracting officer in the pharmaceu-
tical prime vendor division at DLA.
