FOREWORD
The Department of Defense (DoD) must continue to improve product support, with a specific focus on increasing readiness and enabling better cost control. In 2008, the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (ASD) Logistics and Materiel Readiness (L&MR) established a group of senior government, industry, and academia representatives called the Product Support Assessment Team (PSAT) to drive this effort. The PSAT assessed the current status of product support and implementation across the DoD enterprise, identified areas for improvement to procedures and associated policies, provided recommendations for improvement, and laid out a way forward in the Weapon System Acquisition Reform Product Support Assessment (WSAR-PSA) report. In November 2009, the WSAR-PSA report and its eight recommendations were issued. One of the eight recommendations included clarifying and codifying policies and procedures pertaining to the use of analytical tools; including business case analysis (BCA) in the life cycle product support decision making process.
The use of the BCA to make life cycle product support decisions, mandated by policy since 2004, has been plagued with problems of inaccuracy, inconsistent application across the Services and weapon system programs, and a general failure to support effective decision making. This was specifically captured in the December 2008 GAO report, “Improved Analysis and Cost Data Needed to Evaluate the Cost Effectiveness of Performance Based Logistics.” For BCAs to improve in effectiveness, we need to address, clarify, and codify the DoD supported BCA process used to conduct these analyses.
The DoD Product Support BCA Guidebook addresses many of the shortfalls and concerns identified by the GAO and PSAT report, and represents a culmination of research, interviews, and multiple working groups with Service representatives, academia, and industry BCA and Program Management experts. This guidebook is a living document that will continue to be updated with new best practices and methodologies, and it provides overall guidance for conducting a Product Support BCA. This guidebook should be used in conjunction with other analytical tools and guidance and can be further tailored for specific types of BCAs.
Alan F. Estevez
Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense
for Logistics and Materiel Readiness
CHANGE 1:
The guidebook was updated in March 2014 deleting Appendix C and to reflect current law, DoD instructions, and Better Buying Power 2.0.
