Strategic Supply Chain Management - Supply Chain Online

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE PROFILE: Making the Tail Smaller and the Tooth Stronger 183
speed. Major Ken Lasure explains how the concept worked in
Afghanistan: “Due to political considerations, we couldn’t maintain
a permanent presence on the beach in Pakistan or operate during
the daytime. As a result, we had to establish a temporary beach
support area three to four times a week and shuttle equipment and
supplies from the ships to an airfield in Pakistan at night, and then
we’d fly it forward. But at the same time, we were muscling through
some significant communication challenges. More often than not,
the only way I could talk to our personnel in Pakistan was when that
LCAC [Landing Craft Air Cushioned—a hovercraft that transports
personnel, equipment, and supplies ship to shore] went ashore and
I was able to grab someone and say, ‘I need you to do this.’
Nevertheless, the sea-basing operations enabled us to adjust to the
access limitations and still move inland 400 to 500 miles—something
the Marine Corps really isn’t designed, sourced, or organized to do.”
To make the logistics chain organization operate more responsibly
end to end, the Marine Corps has now blended the functions of
distribution, transportation, materiel management, and supply management
under one umbrella. It is mapping its logistical and supply
chain processes at the enterprise level for the first time in its history.
To do this, it has depended on the Supply-Chain Operations
Reference-model (SCOR) described in Chapter 2.
Mapping the processes across the enterprise was no easy matter.
As Keith Rineaman of the Log[istics] Vision Center explains it, it
all starts with the customer, the supported unit—the Marine battalion
that needs products or services. They go through a process
called request management, involving the identification of needs;
they then pass those demands to a supporting unit, which is their
first line of logistics support, their “bellybutton,” as the Marines call
this single point of contact.
A role called order management accepts all those demands from
supported units and turns them into orders and then manages those
orders through to fulfillment. The order manager sources orders to a
set of functional units or activities within the supporting unit. It could
be inventory, maintenance, food—or any product or service. And
they have their own functional management and execution roles and