# Inaugural summit spurs transparency, targets readiness

/ Published July 31, 2018
Fort Belvoir, Virginia, 
Defense Logistics Agency leaders met with over one hundred internal and external partners at the first Service Readiness Demand Planning Summit at the agency’s headquarters, Fort Belvoir, Virginia, July 12-13.

Leaders from DLA Logistics Operations engaged representatives from the military services, Office of the Secretary of Defense, along with leaders of various DLA directorates and major subordinate commands via teleconference in a corporate-level discussion of demand planning influences on service readiness.

“The purpose of this is just to come together and start a journey, not finish a journey,” said DLA Logistics Operations Director Air Force Maj. Gen. Mark Johnson. “For it to be successful, this absolutely has to be a communication event. We’ll take questions back, build relationships and put faces and names together — and then the real work begins, as we work together to improve support to the warfighters.”DLA Logistics Operations Deputy Director Mike Scott encouraged participants to “double-down” during breakout sessions. 

“I think the challenge in these discussions is taking all the great intelligence our guests are bringing and being able to ... put it in a format we can act on both systemically and with our workforce to help get better results,” he said.Johnson promised attendees full access to DLA’s data and metrics.

“In order for us to be able to have effective communication, it’s important for us to share the site picture we’ve got — to share the dialog about how we’re interpreting that site picture and talk about the actions that we’re taking to improve that site picture,” he said. “Transparency makes people a little nervous – and that’s OK. But we can’t do it without your participation.”DLA Director Army Lt. Gen. Darrell Williams has said DLA Logistics Operations must increase demand planning accuracy by 10 percent.“Why do we do that? Warfighter readiness — [to] increase more material availability, get more stuff on the shelf, get our backorder numbers down — more efficiently and effectively utilize that obligation authority ... [and] enhance our buying power,” he said.

Johnson addressed some of the “big challenges” in the current operating environment: Consistently increasing demand expected as a continuing trend; performance for DLA-managed National Item Identification Numbers not where DLA wants it to be; limited obligation authority; and not meeting percentage goals for material availability.

“At the heart of all of this is how we plan for and forecast for this population of items we’ve got to manage,” he said. “The better we can do in that particular area, the higher the probability we’ll have of improving this material availability target.”

The director said another problem is systemic collaboration on future requirements is not always adding value.

“When I asked the team what collaboration meant internal to our own organization, I got about four or five different answers,” he said. “I wonder what happens when we ask the question across the services ... keep that in the back of your mind when we get to discussions on collaboration.”

DLA Acquisition Director Matthew Beebe expounded on the point Scott raised regarding better “shared understanding of actionable intelligence,” made available through forums like the summit. 

“This September, we’re having an industry day, and that will be just one means from which we want to roll out some of this information of what to expect going forward,” Beebe said. “It won’t be limited to the companies that come to that industry day ... but it’s going to be very important — the shared learning we have through this group today and going forward we can also put into actionable intelligence for industry.” 

Briefings were presented on demand plan accuracy, demand volume, service budget and program objective memorandum submissions, material availability and backorders and special emphasis weapons systems programs before the breakout sessions. 

The second day of the summit was devoted to sessions on applying intelligence to improving readiness, consensus on assumptions, and briefings on implications for DLA Energy, DLA Troop Support and USTRANSCOM. The summit concluded with a wrap-up and path forward. 

“We don’t want this to be a one-time thing, where we get together on this day in 2018 and five years from now, we say, ‘well that was a great a summit, but we never had any more conversation,’” Johnson said. “I’d like to make this an enduring process where we get together across all the services on the appropriate timeline so we can be in sync with budget and POM and all those other things that have to work together to support the outcome of getting parts to the warfighter.”