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Even before June, the years of effort were bearing fruit in the current operation. According to Dr. John Dumond, director of the Military Logistics Program for RAND, customer wait time (CWT) — the period from a customer ordering an item until the order is filled — was ranging from 12 to 17 days in Uzbekistan in the early months of this year. “In the past, the military would have ordered large amounts of stock and waited a long time for it to show up — easily 30, 40, or 50 days,” Dumond says. ” The overall initiative — called Velocity Management — is a powerful example of how the principles of lean manufacturing can be applied to logistics and distribution, eliminating waste and gaining widespread supply chain efficiencies.

The approach, developed by Northrop Grumman, was the basis for a program of helping suppliers become lean, and enabled the company to target the suppliers most suited to the program. dj Orthopedics wanted to reduce its number of suppliers and streamline its supply chain. The company understood that achieving a better understanding of its suppliers was the key to achieving those goals, a story told in Chapter 10. Chapter 11 focuses on a different type of company – motorcycle manufacturer Harley Davidson.

In fact, Robbins says, the practices of the Army’s Velocity Management effort, which focused on deliveries to permanent installations, “has become embedded in the Army,” although it is now called Army Distribution 50 Management. ” But a broader effort was needed to achieve the greatest gains needed to support a multi-branch deployment (as is now the case in Iraq). Strategic Distribution is built around what are known as the “3 S’s”: stock positioning, scheduled movements and synchronization. Stock positioning means putting inventory in the right place, primarily at two strategic distribution sites, one on each coast.