An unresponsive bureaucracy that delays repairs of equipment and
deliveries of supplies for weeks and months makes for many frustrated
Marines, says Col. Robert E. Love. But he avows that relief is on
its way.
Love is the head of a year-old Marine Corps agency, with a staff
of nine, created for the sole purpose of shrinking the bureaucracy
that is to blame for “poor customer service,” he said
in a recent interview.
Marines should not have to wait 57 days to have a truck fixed,
nor should they have to operate the nearly 200 disparate computer
systems that today are used to manage battlefield logistics, said
Love. “Some of our young Marines know we can do better. ...
They are frustrated with the system.”
The organization created to overhaul the cumbersome logistics processes
is called the Integrated Logistics Capability Center. Love was among
a selected group of Marines “hand-picked” by Lt. Gen.
Gary S. McKissock, the Corps’ deputy commandant for installations
and logistics.
“We selected Marines who were forward thinking, risk takers,
not afraid of uncertainty, and comfortable with innovation. And
we put them in charge,” McKissock said in an interview at
his Arlington, Va. office.
“My interest in logistics reform had its genesis in the Gulf
War,” he explained. “We watched the Army’s ‘iron
mountain’ [of supplies]. We thought there was a more efficient
way of doing it.” At the core of logistics reform, McKissock
believes, is the “smart” use of information technology
and a lot of “common sense.”
The Marine Corps often finds itself victim of the “tyranny
of square and cube,” he added. The term refers to the difficulties
Marines have in finding enough space on ships to carry all their
supplies. “We only have so much space on board ships. You
have to be very precise in your planning,” said McKissock.
“It’s a tyranny because we have to think about it all
the time.”
To get relief from that tyranny, he said, the Marine Corps needs
to decide what equipment and personnel are essential to accomplish
a given mission, and leave the rest back home.
Such an obvious solution to the problem would have been unrealistic
years ago, before information systems revolutionized the way organizations
manage inventories and deliveries, said McKissock. Since World War
II, the U.S. military services have been told that, wherever they
go, they must bring 60 days worth of supplies. “That was a
reasonable approach, because we didn’t have sophisticated
means of distribution or communications. The use of mass made sense.”
Today, supplies and requests for repairs can be tracked on a Web
site. “We can identify the requirement much more efficiently,”
McKissock said, so there is no reason to bring large stockpiles
of gear to every deployment. Nearly 95 percent of the Corps’
ammunition and fuel moves by ship. In the future, the goal is to
increase reliance on air freight for critical equipment, such as
spare parts.
The management of maintenance workloads and spare parts is far
more advanced for Navy and Marine Corps aviation units, he said.
On the ground side, “we have some catching up to do.”
Supplier Chain
Part of McKissock’s plan is to change the “supply chain,”
so that when Marines need equipment delivered to the battlefield,
they can contact a vendor or a government supplier directly, without
intermediaries. The Corps, for example, traditionally has used five
administrative echelons to manage shipments of spare parts and vehicle
repairs. Each one has its own inventory and its own paperwork processes.
The upshot is an unduly long turnaround time to accomplish routine
repairs and maintenance, McKissock said.
The Corps now is consolidating the five echelons into three. “We
probably will never get to the Caterpillar, or L.L. Bean standard
of 24-hour delivery,” he said, “but we hope to reduce
it significantly.”
Rather than having to wait 57 days for a vehicle to return from
the shop, Marines should expect about the same turnaround time as
they experience at their local car dealer, McKissock said. “We
want our units to be demanding customers and complain bitterly if
it takes too long.”
Much of the slowdown is attributed to excessive paperwork and administrative
chores that have nothing to do with actual maintenance work, he
noted. “We are absolutely convinced that a large percentage
of activity taking place is ‘non-value added,’”
said McKissock. His own records indicate that, every time a piece
of equipment goes into the repair shop, only 10 percent of the time
is spent “turning wrenches.” The remaining 90 percent
of the time, “we are ordering parts, we are inspecting, we
are moving between echelons.”
Eliminating “non-value added” work will mean fewer
Marines working in support roles during combat operations, said
McKissock. These troops will be reassigned to combat units within
the Marine Corps, he said. “The opportunity to reshuffle the
deck will be looked at.”
McKissock expects that the entire Marine Corps will benefit from
these changes. A year ago, he said, “I briefed every three-star
in the Marine Corps. They have embraced the idea [of logistics reform].
They are convinced they are going to get a better product and equipment
will be fixed more efficiently. They also see the potential for
redistributing the manpower. Finally and least importantly, there
are dollar savings.”
He emphasized that the creation of the Integrated Logistics Capability
Center (ILCC) was never about “trying to save people or money.”
But in the process of changing the current business practices, he
said, “we found out that it was too manpower intensive and
too expensive.” About one-third of the workforce in the Marine
Corps is in the logistics business.
The commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. James L. Jones, specifically
stressed the financial savings expected from logistics reform in
a letter to Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, last December. Jones
estimated that the ILCC pilot program would cost $11.8 million in
fiscal 2000, $24.9 million in fiscal 2001 and $12 million in fiscal
2002. The expense, wrote Jones, is a “small cost,” considering
the potential of $500 million to $700 million savings, “primarily
through reduction of inventory.”
There is potential, additionally, for “recurring benefits”
of approximately $100 million a year by fiscal 2004 or 2005, Jones
said. These savings “will be reinvested in [force] readiness.”
McKissock believes there are “tens of millions of dollars
of cost avoidance in secondary repairable systems alone.”
These are major vehicle components, such as engines, generators
and transmissions.
On October 1, the ILCC moved a step forward in logistics reform,
with the worldwide consolidation of the management of secondary
repairable components, he said. That means there is central control
of every unit’s inventory, which will make it possible to
redistribute the supplies based on need. The Corps’ inventory
of secondary repairable systems is worth about $1 billion.
Stovepipe Systems
“We are still doing business the same way we were doing it
20-30 years ago,” said Love, the director of the ILCC. “We
haven’t used technology in our behalf. Some systems we developed
are very good. But they are also very stove-piped.”
A case in point is the use of separate computer systems to support
various lines of commodities, such as ammunition, food and spare
parts. That adds inefficiency, said Love. “Inventories should
be managed under a single supply chain.”
The Corps today operates 168 maintenance shops. “They are
robust, staffed by trained mechanics,” Love said. But it makes
little sense to have each infantry battalion run a full-fledged
shop. “Why not have someone whose core competency is to provide
that service to them?”
By consolidating “selected maintenance” activities,
the shops would not be so concerned that a vehicle is from their
own battalion or from somewhere else. Under the current system,
“you have your own money and your own tools and you worry
about fixing your own.”
A battalion commander should be able to perform the basic organizational-level
maintenance. But more advanced services, which fall under intermediate-level
maintenance, should be provided by logisticians, who may be on base
but may not be part of that unit, Love explained. The “beauty”
of this arrangement, he said, is that a “logistics commander
can reorient capabilities” to fulfill the most pressing needs
at any given time.
Within the existing 168 organizational-level shops in the Marine
Corps, there are 3,205 maintenance workers and 1,269 supply personnel.
“There is redundancy in this area,” said Love. “We
think we can use these people better.”
The 168 shops also carry 126 tons of organizational-level publications,
many of which are “redundant,” he said. Collectively,
the shops use $102 million worth of tools. “Every shop has
to have its own maintenance tool kit.”
One of the ILCC’s goals is to consolidate the 168 shops possibly
into 75, Love said. That process will be made easier by the decision
to collapse what used to be five echelons of maintenance into three
levels: organizational, intermediate and depot.
The consolidation will assist in cutting down the repair cycles,
which range between 50 and 60 days. The average is 57 days. “We
think we can reduce that cycle by 27 days” when you remove
administrative echelons, “just because you are only opening
one repair order, only one quality control, one parts requisition
transaction. You are not going to waste any time transitioning from
battalion to intermediate-level maintenance.”
As a result of the time required to transport equipment, “as
soon as I can cut repair cycle times, I can reduce inventories,”
said Love. “We base our inventories on how long it takes to
fix equipment. If it takes longer, I have to have more stuff on
the shelves.” The current average of 57 days to repair equipment
is “ridiculous,” said Love. “We should have higher
standards than what we have in our personal lives, for our personal
vehicles.”
The ILCC also plans to categorize processes and inventory based
on their importance to the mission and their uniqueness, he said.
Under the traditional supply structure, for example, “almost
everything is handled as if it’s critical.” Certain
staples that are not critical to the military mission should not
occupy storage space, said Love. Conversely, essential pieces of
equipment, such as tank engines, may need to be stocked far forward,
close to the battlefield.
“Today, the way we manage inventory, we pretty much try to
move everything forward. That means we tie up people and airlift
assets,” he noted. In the future, “we will only push
forward things that are critical and have high mission value.”
Love admitted that these ideas hardly qualify as revolutionary.
“This is common sense stuff. But, frankly, the military is
just now beginning to realize this. Sometimes you stumble and bumble
onto these things.”
The Marine Corps currently uses between 140 to 200 computer systems
for logistics applications, some of which are Pentagon-wide systems,
said Love. “It’s a big spaghetti bowl.”
The ILCC is working to simplify the “spaghetti bowl”
into a single “war-fighter portal,” he said. It will
be a Web-based storefront, where Marines can order spare parts and
supplies just as easily as anyone orders books from Amazon.com.
The portal will be available on secure and non-secure communication
lines.
Love’s nine-person staff is not attempting to do this work
by itself. They are receiving help from contractors and from the
Pennsylvania State University School of Logistics.
In the logistics arena, said Love, “we think that [private]
industry has a more responsive set of metrics. ... But we are not
embracing everything that is out there in industry. Some of it doesn’t
apply to combat operations.” The one set of metrics that Love
wants to adopt from the private sector is the response time, which
is measured in hours, days or weeks. “We measure in days,
weeks and months.”
Within the next two years, he said, he expects the ILCC will succeed
in “institutionalizing the changes.” The goal is to
achieve substantial reforms by 2005, “so the Marine Corps
may not need this ILCC organization any more.”
McKissock predicts that it will be “three to four years before
we see things happen.” The bottom line, he said, is whether
Marines in combat will get faster service. Otherwise, the current
reform efforts will become just one more of those inside-the-Beltway
“battles of the brochure.”