A Defense Logistics Agency Troop Support Medical screening process analyzes high-demand customer orders and, where possible, reroutes them to the less-costly electronic commerce buying process, reducing customer costs by about $20 million per year, an official in the organization said.
The process, known as “trap,” falls under one of DLA Director Navy Vice Adm. Mark Harnitchek’s five “Big Ideas,” which charge the agency to find innovative ways to decrease direct costs.
“That's exactly what the trap does,” Mike Medora, chief of the Medical Contingency Contracting Integrated Support Team, said. “It identifies orders that normally would be destined for individual or manual direct vendor delivery buys and sources them to established long-term contracts that use very efficient e-commerce business processes. The results are faster delivery to our customers at substantial lower costs.”
Medora said the trap reduces cost to the customer by about 30 to 65 percent of the order value and delivers in five to seven days, while traditional acquisitions take 30 to 45 days to deliver.
The process saves on cost and also reduces work.
By servicing orders via e-commerce, the trap also reduces the manual, labor-intensive direct vendor delivery workload that is routinely used to fill military standard requisitioning and issue procedures orders, Medora added.
“It does the annual work of about 18 well-trained acquisition personnel,” he said.
The trap scans select incoming traditional military standard requisitioning and issue procedure orders and determines if the MILSTRIP orders can be satisfied using e-commerce, either electronic catalog or contingency long-term contract.
If e-commerce can satisfy the customer's request, the process provides status to the customer and forwards the order along for execution and delivery, Ted Halkidis, a medical project integrator said.
Another feature of the trap is its virtual transparency to the customer.
“They don’t have to do anything special on their end but to enjoy the benefits,” Medora said. “The only difference the customer may notice is some slight differences in packaging, but they should definitely notice the faster delivery time and substantial reduction in the delivered cost.”
Although the trap has been in existence about three years, it has been expanded and enhanced over time as the organization learns how to use it more effectively, Halkidis said.
Since DLA Troop Support’s medical customers have many options to fulfill their medical material requirements, Halkidis said cost-saving initiatives like the trap are important.
“To maintain our sales,” he said, “we must remain competitive and find ways to add value to our customers' ordering experience.”