Department of Defence In Transportation (Research Paper Sample)

Introduction
In the United States, the department of defence is highly dependent on the defence transportation system for the transportation of the required supplies to the military in the various section of the world; there is increased need for scrutinizing and upgrading the system in order to avoid weakness being discovered by terrorists. Aspects that comprise the defence transportation system are vital components of the DOD to express its power worldwide; hence, these aspects can be used to complement the optimal practices within supply chain management. The department of defence has, for quite a long time, gone through a number of challenges in the management of its supply chain material, asset visibility and managing inventory. Defence transportation system has impressively improved the strategies for transportation of materials, improving the supply chain management at the same time.
Literature Review
Defence transportation system incorporates supply chain objectives which are important to the department of defence as it creates a framework where there is a common knowledge on the design of the transport chain as well as the roles of each department. For the developed framework and functions of every process, dependent roles are put in place to control the performance and operation of each body(Rabbath, 2010). The department of defence has developed numerous strategies in defence transportation since the Operation Iraqis Freedom whereby the transportation of weapons and materials were constantly attacked by rebels directing the operation to a poor performance due to lack of weaponry and food supplies to the soldiers.
The department has developed rigorous management process in an attempt to ensure that the transportation system gets minimal interference(Tyler, 2004). The induction of metrics in monitoring of transport trails as well as supply management has become more frequent according to Rabbath(Rabbath, 2010). There has been improved database management in the department of defence allowing the management to track situations in transportation management as well as predicting attacks and diversions when necessary(Tyler, 2004). The department of defence has also improved the use of radio frequency identifications in communication from those at field and those in the headquarters. Through the radio communication, there is more vivid identification data of supply chains and transportation systems in the transport and communication departments(Rabbath, 2010).
The DOD has significantly improved the rationalization process for the activities at hand through improvement of features such as warehousing which has been continuously developed by the Base Realignment and closure (BRAC). All of the DOD transportation and supply activities have been noted to generate numerous serviceable returns and the aim to improve the process has been on the rise according to research by National Defence Research Institute(Rabbath, 2010). The department of Defence is one of the topmost government assets and through the reputation the department has been able to uphold an outstanding delivery in the transportation and supply sector as well as the extended scope of performance(Tyler, 2004).
Supply chain is made up of all the processes that are incorporated in ensuring that materiel reaches the end consumer and begins at the time when the client’s needs for a good are identified while supply chain management entails all the plans, integration and executions of process to attain the needs of supply chain’s investors. In the 90s, the DOD initiated a long-term effort to ensure that its supply chain management has been improved in addition to the improvement of performance, harvesting of vital effectiveness via process improving strategies. However, the DOD still has more opportunities to carry out these improvements basically through the integration of the supply chain via processes and in a complete unified supply chain, the activities have been intertwined in a manner that deign processes and executions decisions have to take into considerations the various impacts. The department of defence today is tasked with the role of managing more than five million inventory goods like repair tools that have a value of around ninety-eight billion; hence, an effective supply management system is paramount. In that, such a well-integrated and efficient system will help in the support of readiness and abilities of the military and for DOD to cut on the financials spent on unnecessary inventory that could otherwise be used on other governmental priorities. In a case study that was conducted theatre inventory by OIF, vulnerabilities and the significance of improving the DOD supply chain were emphasised considering that the case culminated on the need of an integrated supply chain. Therefore, an integration that will lead to efficiency in the supply chain management will ensure weaknesses in inventory management are eradicated along with vulnerabilities within materiel distribution and asset visibility.
Discussion of Ideas
The management of supply chains and improvement of security factor has been a threshold for the department of justice in realizing more successful ways of achieving efficient transportation. The diversity of the procedures and protocols involved has been a debated issue in the department in an aim of forecasting and predicting any errors that may occur in transit. The DOD main concern is on the reduction of on-hand inventory considering that for it to attain the 2013 target; DLA was forced to get rid of eight hundred and fifty five million dollars in goods that the defence logistics agency economic assessment warranted that should be preserved due to the chance of buying the same goods in future.
Figure 1: Inventory management (source: CITATION USG15 \l 2057 (U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2015))
Materiel distribution is the other factor that has been affected by the supply chain management considering that the DOD is tasked with the role of operating a financial intensive distribution system for availing required equipment’s to the united states military. The main goal of the distribution system is to ensure that the correct goods are delivered at the correct time in addition to the correct price. Today, the federal government is going through grave monetary challenges and the department of defence may encounter high competition in the coming few years for federal discretionary funds. Due to the monetary environment, the department of justice needs to carry out its services of distributing war fighter resources in a discretional and effective manner. The present department of defence supply chain management has also been identified asset visibility as one of the areas that needs more attention considering that it has contributed to the difficulty being experienced in the attainment of timely and accurate data on assets. The department of defence appears to be lagging behind in the strengthening of asset visibility in addition to the completion and implementation of its strategy for the coordination of efforts to enhance asset visibility within the department. The present monitoring strategy that has been implemented by DOD on asset visibility is also not efficient considering that the department does not have a central technique to track the progress of improvements or the recourse allocation. Additionally, the present draft strategy that is being used by the DOD lacks performance measurements yardsticks; even though it was able to cater for far end aims address the needed results from the implementation. The importance of the performance indicators are that they will be helpful in the assessment of whether the strategies implemented are headed to the right direction in terms of facilitating the attainment of performance expectations.
Discussion of New Solutions
As a way of improving the present inventory management, the department of defence should ensure that it carries out regular reassessment of the inventory-reduction goals in addition to the timetable of attaining them on the basis of the economic analysis. Materiel distribution also needs to be improved through the development of a complete corrective action plan with the examples of reduction in enterprise level distribution costs. The department of justice needs to establish a unified information environment for asset visibility that can lead to a measurable result toward the attainment of efficiency and effectiveness. Moreover, the department of justice also needs to add data in its strategy and SEPs on aspects needed in the development of cost estimates, to openly connect the performance measures for the strategy objectives and to prove that the creativities lead to quantifiable results.
* The Supply Chain Objective
In the department of defence, the primary objective does not relate to the realization of profits like in the private sector's supply chain. The chain management in Defence Transportation management is mostly related to the combinations of quality and time of services and the costs incurred in the process. The defence capabilities can be related to monetary values, as this is a one-dimensional objective, which can be efficiently, utilized (Rabbath, 2010). However, the monetary value of the security capabilities does not have a basis of analysis and therefore it cannot be used leave alone agreed upon (National Research Council, 2006). In order to realize maximum national security, there are three, there are there possible and evident forms of objective functions flow which include; maximization of the defence capabilities when provided with an individual budget, adjusting of the budget in context to realize a condition where the value of the budge...