# Value Stream Analysis in Military Logistics:
## 4 Case Study  
As previously said, ABC is a military unit in charge of the supply of a wide range of spare parts. Due to the importance of response times for armed forces purposes, the selected process to be improved is the order processing of spare parts and new materials that military units deployed in national and international locations demand. Therefore, the study is focused on the procedure between the order generation from a military unit that requests the material and transportation to the final destination. In the Define phase of DMAIC and after the constitution of the project team, the process under study was selected, and data collection was done from the registered information in the main database of ABC. In this case, we considered the orders, which are processed daily by the ABC unit. The key performance indicator (KPI) of the process to be optimized is the lead-time of the order fulfillment. Thus, it was assumed the lead-time of the process was the sum of not only the order's processing time but also waiting times that could produce delays or intermediate stocks along the process. Due to the different activities carried out in the process, the complete lead-time was also subdivided into several intermediate times that were measured. In particular, the lead-time used in this work was calculated from the date when ABC received the order until the date when the delivery notification was sent to the requesting military unit. Once the process to be analyzed and its reference KPIs were defined, the goals of the project could be established. The organization ABC initially proposed to reduce the lead-time of the order processing at the end of the project up to 0.5 days. Additionally, the following requirements and targets are settled:  
* Non-value added activities in the supply process should be identified. * The affected areas of the process and the required times of their activities should be evaluated. * General process improvements should be identified and the effectiveness of the actions proposed should be validated. * The new procedure should be documented by redefining activities, workflow, responsibilities, and layouts. * The requirements established by their own organization should be guaranteed. The analysis of the current performance of ABC was carried out in the measure phase based on the historical data of the years: 2014, 2015, and 2016. The ABC unit handles an average of 15,000 orders per year, which could correspond, independently, to requests from a national territory or from the operation zone. Based on the origin of the order, a priority is assigned. The initial study calculated the average lead-time of the process before the lean optimization to establish a reference value as a zero point for the lead-time indicator. The values calculated for 2015 were 6.76 days for the average lead-time and 6.74 days for the standard deviation of the process in the study. It is worth mentioning the high dispersion of the values measured. Therefore, an additional target for minimizing the high variability of the process was settled. Additionally, the main incidences in terms of time and frequency, material parts affected, and their potential causes were identified. In this way, an analysis of critical materials was carried out for the most representative period (January to June 2016). It can be concluded that 5% of the material orders were completed on the same day that the supply order was generated from the unit. However, there were critical materials with relatively high values of lead-time. As shown in Figure 2a, among all the materials ordered from January to June 2016, 3% of those material numbers had a lead-time greater than 9 days. This value has been considered as critical after the analysis of lead times in years 2015 and 2016, in terms of average lead-time and standard deviation. These relatively high average lead time values resulted from having materials with high peak lead time values and low ordering frequency, or high ordering frequencies with more moderate lead times.