United States Defense Logistics Agency (DLA): Supply Chain Modernization

Today, DLA manages more than 5 million consumable items and processes more than 30 million annual distribution actions from three inventory control points in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Columbus, Ohio, and Richmond, Virginia. More than 20,000 employees in 48 states and 28 countries around the world support these efforts. Annual sales exceed $35 billion.

DLA is radically changing its business approach to modernize supply chain processes and systems such as order fulfillment, supply and demand planning, material management, procurement and financial management. A key challenge was to determine a way to enable an easy exchange of data across the supply chain and boost the visibility of assets in each system.

DLA selected Accenture to develop an integrated data environment (IDE) to continue its transformation efforts. IDE is a shared-service capability that will better manage and route the logistical transactions required to handle DLA's vast inventory.

Accenture implemented a solution to support the initial increment of IDE: to provide core architecture for IDE using best-of-breed integration platforms (BEA and webMethods) and to allow Component Advanced Development (CAD) for a COTS-based concept to integrate DLA's Enterprise Business Systems (EBS) data into the IDE.

Powered by a suite of leading commercial off-the-shelf technology solutions, IDE is a complete integration engine that addresses business processes, data strategy, operations and technologies. IDE drives an integrated services network that manages requisitions and updates, inventory searches and allocations, status inquiries, vendor communication, shipment processing and business transaction. Specifically, Accenture implemented:

• An IDE that is extensible to all services/components to integrate and manage corporate-level data produced by EBS and other modernization applications, as well as corporate data produced by legacy and emerging applications.
  
  
• A modern, standards-based framework that connects legacy systems with emerging technologies.
  
  
• A framework that provides adaptability of data to new business processes; provides up-to-date supply chain data; enables rapid adoption of emerging technologies; and supports the overall U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and DLA Enterprise Logistics Architectures.

• Logistics interoperability: The IDE executes practices, processes, applications and decision support tools to achieve logistics interoperability.
  
  
• Service-oriented architecture (SOA) foundation: SOA foundation grounded on standards-based exchange, metadata capture and componentization of services by business function.
  
  
• Logistics exchange utility: Supports information exchange within and between internal and external DoD business partners, trading partners, services and commercial exchanges.
  
  
• Data enhancement: Quality of data from legacy to modernization systems, such as business process modernization, is improved. Use of BPM to enable access to and monitor real-time access of IDE Web services (currently in development).
  
  
• Established standards: Provides the shared language in an integrated business unit by providing a structure for optimal use of open source, modular code and industry standards. Creation of common services across developed integration capabilities minimizes interface costs.
  
  
• Collaborative development: Enables collaborative development through the use of metadata management and portal capabilities.