Military Logistics Forum, July 2012
“What DoD faces is a multi-party, multi-echelon problem,” said Gary Bradt, public sector vice president for One Network Enterprises. “They have a lot of silos that can’t communicate with each other. You can’t derive value or achieve rapid responses with all these disparate systems and processes.”
One Network provides a real-time network that connects the various segments of a supply chain. “We set out to build responsiveness into the supply chain network by eliminating lead time and continually syncing and re-syncing supply, demand and capacity across all trading partners,” said Bradt. “This way, the supply chain can be managed by exception. Achieving total asset visibility, regardless of what systems are running across the enterprise, helps provide the highest possible service level at the lowest possible cost.”
“In a military supply chain, you might have small businesses making components of a weapons systems and selling them to a larger manufacturer,” said Malin. “All this goes through a product manager who is acquiring goods and services for the ultimate customer in the field: the warfighter who is going to use the system.”
In the case of the Marine Corps implementation, One Network connected the Marine Corps legacy system with those of the Army and Navy. Eventually, the Marines asked One Network to replace its legacy system. One Network provided the Marines solutions that included inventory management, requisition management, lot tracking, serialized item tracking, master data management, inventory planning and in-transit tracking.
“These solutions helped the U.S. Marine Corps achieve total asset visibility and provide end-to-end order management from procurement to the warfighter,” said Bradt.
One Network also helped the U.S. Marine Corps reduce total system cost of deployment, maintenance and support, improve service levels to 124 supported activities, and improve customer satisfaction with over 99 percent system uptime. It reduced the transaction error rate from over 60 percent in the legacy system to the low single digits with the new system.
“One Network Enterprises has successfully helped the U.S. Marine Corps accelerate the migration of its applications and data to a modern network-centric environment that will support rapid development of future capabilities and accelerated business transformation,” said Bradt.
The Navy Department was so impressed by the One Network implementation that it awarded the Marine Corps the Department of the Navy Information Management IT Excellence Award. The award recognizes superior quality of information technology projects, teams and individuals helping to transform the Navy and the U.S. Marine Corps through information technology.
