16 March 2010

By Chief Logistics Officer Colonel Charles Lott

Since my last editorial about this time last year, Army Logistics has changed significantly.

We launched the Army Logistics Transformation Programme (ALTP) in March 2009 with the promise to Army that the time for talking was over and we would deliver on our promises. We have. The ALTP is a synchronised and coherent programme of work designed to ensure that Army Logistics is shaped for, and relevant to, the future.

The Army Logistics team (formerly Log Exec) has been busy simplifying and automating logistics with deliverables like barcoding, automation of materiels planning within SAP, shifting the control of Army valuated inventory to COMLOG(A), reshaping logistics command and control to allow end-to-end management and improving materiel visibility.

The ALTP was designed to ensure that Army Logistics could transition into the new consolidated Defence Logistics Command, commanded by COMLOG, Air Commodore Peter Guy, effectively. The ELT has already signed off on the high level design of it.

Essentially the Services’ depth logistics (3rd and 4th line) will be commanded by COMLOG through Commander Logistics Group (Land) (COMLOG(A)) but 1st and 2nd line logistics will remain largely unchanged except the CLG(L) will have technical command over Army logistics (1st – 4th line) to ensure commonality of approach and an end-to-end focus.

At the point of logistics delivery little will change, but where logistics is provided by a Service to the NZDF or where a commodity can and should be managed centrally, this will be formalised by a ‘common logistics’ stream.

Soon Army will see the Line Item Accounting and Complete Equipment Schedule project begin to deliver results. All these are designed to make logisticians and units lives a bit easier by harnessing technology and replacing inventory with information.

One initiative we are undertaking is trading some older items of engineering plant for a smaller number of newer, far more capable plant items for Plant Operations without money changing hands. It is this type of innovation that we want to see as we improve our capability for the future in times of extreme financial constraint.

Most of you will know that Lockheed Martin (LM) won the tender process done under Project Alexander. SA 1977 is the new name for the depot level maintenance repair and overhaul and warehousing service currently performed at Trentham under FM 585 and the services in Waiouru performed under FM 1060.

As we develop SA 1977 we will migrate to a Performance Based Logistics (PBL) environment, better know as ‘power by the hour’. This type of environment focuses on the ‘what is required, when it is required and why it is required’, leaving the ‘how it is provided’ to the supplier, in our case LM.

The new environment may also see Army not owning equipment, rather hiring it instead of having equipment that is only used for short periods of time. We are progressing a project called Managed Fleet Utilisation which will see a number of vehicles withdrawn from service, upgraded technologically, (GPS, automatic load sensing, drive-train monitoring) and placed into regional pools.

Units will be required to forecast when they want to use them on-line, use the equipment and return it to the pools. The MFU concept can be expanded to many types of equipment in our inventory but will not include specialist equipment required by units to meet their operational outputs.

I would like to acknowledge my staff at HQ Army Logistics. My team have willingly taken COMLOG(A)’s vision and started making it a reality.

A last thought…“I never think of the future…it comes soon enough” (Albert Einstein).

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