USA — Logistics Agency Aims for Efficiencies, Savings

FORT BELVOIR, Va. — Defense Logis­tics Agency Direc­tor Navy Vice Adm. Alan S. Thomp­son today released his fis­cal 2011 Director’s Guid­ance, which refo­cus­es the agency’s goals with an empha­sis on increas­ing effi­cien­cies and sav­ings in accor­dance with Defense Depart­ment require­ments.

“DLA is putting its full sup­port behind Sec­re­tary [of Defense Robert] Gates’ require­ments to reduce the department’s over­head so that more mon­ey can go to troop devel­op­ment and force mod­ern­iza­tion,” Thomp­son said. “Ini­tia­tives are includ­ed in the fis­cal 2011 guid­ance that ensure DLA will increase the effi­cien­cy and effec­tive­ness of our process­es. That’s just good busi­ness and part of DLA’s oblig­a­tion to its customers.” 

The 2011 Director’s Guid­ance includes input from DLA’s Strate­gic Plan for fis­cal years 2010–2017, DoD’s recent­ly pub­lished Logis­tics Strate­gic Plan and oth­er DoD guid­ance. The guid­ance includes 19 ini­tia­tives, some of which are being con­tin­ued from the fis­cal 2010 director’s guid­ance. The fis­cal 2011 guid­ance con­tin­ues to empha­size DLA’s three strate­gic focus areas of Warfight­er Sup­port Enhance­ment, Stew­ard­ship Excel­lence, and Work Force Development. 

DLA’s warfight­er sup­port ini­tia­tives focus on sup­port of oper­a­tions in Afghanistan and Iraq, improv­ing busi­ness oper­a­tions and con­tract­ing to bet­ter serve warfight­ers, and devel­op­ing logis­tics effi­cien­cies that bet­ter serve cus­tomers and save mon­ey, offi­cials said. Stew­ard­ship ini­tia­tives focus on pur­su­ing price reduc­tions, improv­ing detec­tion and deter­rence of coun­ter­feit mate­r­i­al, and meet­ing Con­gres­sion­al and DOD inven­to­ry man­age­ment and over­all sup­ply chain per­for­mance. Work force devel­op­ment ini­tia­tives focus on ensur­ing that per­son­nel agency capa­bil­i­ties match present and future mis­sion require­ments, sup­port­ing diver­si­ty and enhanc­ing DLA’s per­for­mance-dri­ven culture. 

“As we move into the new fis­cal year and begin to work on the focus areas and ini­tia­tives in the 2011 guid­ance, we’ll apply what we learned in the past months to our oper­a­tions,” Thomp­son said. “We’ll con­tin­ue to pro­vide best-val­ue logis­tics to the armed forces as we antic­i­pate and meet the require­ments of the com­ing years. DLA will keep look­ing beyond the near hori­zon to the future, and we’ll con­tin­ue to devel­op and imple­ment cut­ting-edge capa­bil­i­ties and prod­ucts for our customers.” 

As the Depart­ment of Defense’s com­bat logis­tics sup­port agency, DLA pro­vides the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, oth­er fed­er­al agen­cies, and joint and allied forces with a vari­ety of logis­tics, acqui­si­tion and tech­ni­cal ser­vices. The agency sources and pro­vides near­ly 100 per­cent of the con­sum­able items America’s mil­i­tary forces need to oper­ate, from food, fuel and ener­gy, to uni­forms, med­ical sup­plies, and con­struc­tion and bar­ri­er equip­ment. DLA also sup­plies more than 80 per­cent of the military’s spare parts. 

Head­quar­tered at Fort Belvoir, Va., DLA has about 27,000 employ­ees world­wide and sup­ports about 1,700 weapon sys­tems. DLA’s busi­ness rev­enues were about $41 bil­lion in fis­cal year 2010. 

Source:
U.S. Depart­ment of Defense
Office of the Assis­tant Sec­re­tary of Defense (Pub­lic Affairs) 

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