S
ecretary of the Army John McHugh has designated U.S. Army Materiel Command (AMC) as the Lead Materiel Integrator (LMI), a dis- tinction established to help the service implement a new, improved method of cataloguing, managing, tracking, and dis- tributing equipment across the force.
The LMI is implicitly geared toward increasing the overall visibility of equip- ment throughout the Army. It draws upon a central database called the Logis- tics Information Warehouse (LIW) and a new software optimization tool designed to better integrate equipment manage- ment by linking supply with demand.
The LMI effort, to be formally established by Feb. 15, puts AMC in the lead role of coordinating equipment distribution; the idea is to successfully identify equipment needs and to facilitate or streamline distri- bution according to established priorities.
“The Army’s new approach for managing materiel is being designed to effectively and efficiently distribute and redistrib- ute materiel to support the generation of trained and ready forces. Moreover, it must represent a different way of doing business that will foster open commu- nication, improve collaboration, and eliminate redundancies in the process,” McHugh said in Army Directive 2011-06, Designation of U.S. Army Materiel Command as the Army’s Lead Materiel Integrator (LMI), dated March 22, 2011.
“As we transition into this new process for managing our materiel, I expect all Army commands and agencies to examine their logistical processes to make them more agile and efficient, as well as compliant with these changes.”
WHERE THE NEED IS The LMI effort is designed to break the stovepipes and ad hoc strategies associated
GLOBAL INVENTORY
The thousands of items in the Theater Redistribution Center at the “W2N” yard on Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, represent one of many elements in the Army supply system, both in theater and in the United States, that the LIW and a new software optimization tool will better integrate. (Photo by CPL Christopher Bigelow.)
with the Army’s current approach and to pave the way toward a more efficient, timely, and economical approach to equipment management. Not only does the Army expect to have total visibility of equipment throughout the force, but it also will be positioned to better identify equipment needs and effectively match them with the supply base.
The software optimization tool is engi- neered to simultaneously account for a multitude of factors to calculate how to get the right equipment to the right place at the right time, said James C. Dwyer, AMC’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Logistics, G-4.
This new Decision Support Tool (DST) is aimed at determining how the Army can best predict and anticipate the equip- ment needs of a unit slated to deploy to
Afghanistan in six months. The DST will be able to predict the quantities of equip- ment a brigade would need based, at least in part, on historical requirements.
“The Decision Support Tool will optimize requirements and make decisions on the distribution of equipment. It provides an automatic feed of all of the demand requirements so we see them instantly. The optimization software is capable of solving thousands of equations at the same time. For example, we won’t take a tank and transport it from Fort Stewart, GA, to Fort Carson, CO, when there is a tank sitting much closer that we may not otherwise see,” Dwyer explained.
The current equipment management system relies on a host of different report- ing and cataloguing entities that are
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LOGISTICS
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