Defense Logistics Chief Highlights Benefits of Change.

• Author: Kutner, Joshua A.
• Position: Henry T. Glisson - Brief Article

These are exciting times at the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), according to its director. "I always say, 'I can't believe they pay me to do this,'" joked Army Lt. Gen. Henry T. Glisson, during an interview at Fort Belvoir, Va. Joking aside, "for a guy who's a logistician, it doesn't get any better than this job. So it's really been fun."

Now, in the final five months of his four-year term as head of DLA, Glisson shared some of the highlights of the job. During his tenure, he has overseen a decline in paperwork, the rise of electronic commerce and his organization's ongoing struggle to implement a commercial supply-chain management system designed to get supplies to the military services as soon as they need them. DLA's vision statement for the 21st century, DLA-21, stipulates that such a system should be in place in 2004.

DLA has learned from experiences of the commercial sector, said Glisson, in trying to develop the automated supply-chain system. But even more so, the agency has looked at what has taken place in the medical community. Progress has been made, he said, to automate distribution of certain supplies, but a common system that works across military service borders is still in the works.

"We went to the medical community, and we said, 'how do you [perform] medical resupply for your customers?' And what we saw was they had their own system. It was an electronic system with electronic orders, and we basically took their system, and we brought it into the Department of Defense."

The system is called "prime vendor," and it has been successful in getting food to the military services, said Glisson. "We found that it worked in some instances for clothing and textiles," he added. "And we found small successes, not very many, in repair parts. We found that in the repair parts industry, there really wasn't a closely knit segment in the economy that managed [them]. ... For those instances where we couldn't take the commercial model, what we basically said is 'we'll create one'--what we call a 'virtual prime vendor'. With virtual prime vendor, we take the best of industry and the best of government, and we kind of merge them together in some sort of partnership arrangement, so that we try to gain the same sort of efficiencies that we did under the prime vendor concept.

"It's an area [where] we have much more to do, and that's in the area of aircraft repair parts, electronics, those sort of items."

Glisson began working with DLA in 1993, at...