Strategic Supply Chain Management - Supply Chain Online

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE PROFILE: Making the Tail Smaller and the Tooth Stronger 175
and it includes the acquisition community. The point is that you have a
world of partners who are being called on to deliver this end-to-end capability.
It’s the extended supply chain,” Morales says.
“Nobody owns all the partners,” she continues. “There is no single
manager of this supply system or owner of that system. Right now, the
DoD is building the partnerships, the protocols, and the systems that will
get us to the goal of end-to-end capability. And we’re starting to see some
amazing successes in this area.”
THE INTEGRATED ENTERPRISE INITIATIVE: FROM EXCESS
TO ACCESS WITH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (IT)
Enterprise integration is the circle around the cross and the enabler of
integrated weapon system support and end-to-end distribution. The fasttrack
evolution of the DoD’s data enterprise from hundreds of cold-war
legacy systems and their hundreds of millions of lines of code to state-ofthe
art information systems and processes integrated across the national
defense supply chain has been one of the most ambitious programs in the
FLE agenda.
Laura Faught, cochair of the Program Implementation Group, one
of the FLE’s “triangle groups,” and assistant deputy under secretary of
defense for logistics systems management, talked to us about the process
and progress of logistics systems modernization: “First, and most obviously,
we developed the overall enterprise data strategy collaboratively
with parts of our logistics domain. A basic lesson in change management
is that you don’t stuff an architecture, especially a process-oriented architecture,
down the throat of an $80 billion supply chain. We pulled in
from across the DoD logistics domain, business process owners and key
stakeholders from the Defense Logistics Agency, the Army, Navy, Air
Force, Marines, Joint Forces Command, and TRANSCOM. This gave us
an anchoring in our customers’ perspectives,
just as the SCOR model anchored us
in a process orientation.”
Faught says her group leveraged the
IT community’s technical views of the standards
and focused on architecture, data
strategy, portfolio management, and “a scalable,
repeatable process to ensure that we’re
very smart acquirers of commercial technologies
to support our system and process
integration.” She thinks the key to success in
“You don’t stuff a
process architecture
down the throat of
an $80 billion supply
chain,” says Laura
Faught.