Weapon-System-Oriented Supply Management at DLA: Relating Inventory Investment to Readiness

As DoDs primary wholesale supplier and manager of consumable hardware items, DLA can improve its contribution to weapon-system readiness while still controlling inventory costs. Improvements are possible in two key areas 1 in the identification and management of first indenture weapon-system consumables and 2 in the treatment of all DLA-managed items weapon-system and otherwise without regard to indenture when wholesale safety level requirements are computed. First-indenture consumables can be identified by combining two standard DoD logistics data elements Source, Maintenance, and Recoverability codes and Logistics Support Analysis Record indenture codes. Statistical analysis shows that the relative frequency of weapon-system-grounding items among first-indenture consumables is significantly greater than the relative frequency of grounding items among the population of consumables at large. That, together with indications that first-indenture items represent less than 10 percent of the total number of items DLA manages, suggests DLA can reduce inventory requirements for many items without adversely affecting readiness. When performing system calculations to determine wholesale safety level requirements, DLA groups items into the commodity categories of industrial, electronic, construction, and general items. Availability, Common components, Consumables, Corporate information management, DLA, Defense Logistics Agency, EOQ, Economic order quantity, Inventory, Inventory management, Item essentiality, Readiness, Readiness-based sparing, Safety level, Secondary item weapon system management, Sparing-to-availability, Supply, Supply model, Variable safety level, Weapon-system support