U.S. Transportation Command curbing 'customer wait time'.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.

Military units deployed in Saudi Arabia, on average, wait more than two weeks to receive a piece of equipment that they requested from a supply center in the United States.

Two weeks may he deemed an eternity in a world where one can get Fed Ex guaranteed overnight delivery, but for U.S. military forces in remote corners of the globe, two-week service is much faster than what they are used to.

The "customer wait time in Southwest Asia is now 15.2 days, compared to 17.4 days two years ago, said Army Lt. Gen. Daniel G. Brown, who retired from the service last month as the deputy chief of the U.S. Transportation Command.

During a wide-ranging interview shortly before his retirement, Brown said that the Transportation Command has made it a top priority to shorten the process of delivering supplies to the troops. In Bosnia, for example, the "customer wait time" has slipped from 15.3 days to 11.3.

The buzzword that Brown used to describe the command's approach to expediting supplies to the theater is "end-to-end distribution."

This means that, rather than wait for the supplies to leave the manufacturing plant, get recorded and matched up with requests from field units, the Transportation Command uses an advanced computer system to register those supplies before they even come off the assembly line and begins to make shipping and delivery arrangements. By doing that, several days can be shaved off the supply cycle, said Brown.

"We are scheduling to move items before they are turned over to the transportation system," he said. Brown described this process as the "synchronization of supply and transportation.

Even though defense transportation officials have reported successful results from their end-to-end distribution efforts, the reality is that more coordination between the supply and the transportation operations would help shrink further the customer wait time.

One way to link the two functions more closely would be to merge the key supplier of military goods, the Defense Logistics Agency, and the Transportation Command. Brown did not specifically advocate such a move, but he noted that discussions have been ongoing at the Pentagon for some time, on how the two agencies could work closer together to shorten delivery times.

Today, said Brown, "We do not have a single owner of the distribution pipeline." The Transportation Command, with a staff of about 730 officers, civilian public servants and contractors, is the "single manager" for the...