9/7/2010
HEADLINES
PERSPECTIVE: Under New Name, Agency Buying $590m in Fasteners

DLA Aviation is the new official name of Defense Logistics Agency’s aviation demand and supply chain management that handled 307,937 fastener stock items and $589.8 million in sales last year.

The Defense agency bought 2.33 million items last year. A 57% majority of the orders are for less than 10,000 of the stock items.

 

Fasteners are now handled by the DLA Aviation Supplier Operations in Philadelphia. There are 300 employees in Philadelphia, headed by director Chris Brown. DLA Aviation is headquartered in Richmond, VA.

 

Previously DLA Aviation was known as the Defense Industrial Supply Center.

 

DLA Aviation launched a “We Are DLA” campaign this summer to create a single-agency environment among customers and global employees.

 

The agency has field sites in 48 states and 28 countries to help customers get the supplies they need, said DLA Director Navy vice admiral Alan Thompson.

 

The first step in changing DLA’s identity is renaming individual segments.  Thus the agency the fastener industry has traditionally dealt with, the Defense Supply Center Philadelphia, is now DLA Troop Support.

 

Officials said agency leaders want to be unified in delivering what warfighters expect and to be viewed by stakeholders as a single enterprise, officials said.

 

This is the first time in DLA’s 49-year history that an attempt has been made to make organizational names consistent, Thompson added. “The ‘We Are DLA’ initiative couldn’t have come at more appropriate time for us, especially considering the aviation sites we’ve activated over the past three years as part of BRAC 2005,” said Navy vice admiral Vince Griffith, DLA Aviation commander.

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Base Realignment & Closure 2005 law mandated that military services transfer responsibility for supply, storage and distribution and depot-level reparable procurement operations to DLA.

 

DLA Aviation conducts an annual Industry Day for 40 vendors of fasteners used in military aviation to find ways to work together “toward improving warfighter support,” DLA public affairs spokesperson Stephen Baker said.

 

DLA Aviation has more than 300 employees responsible for “helping America’s military aviation community keep things together, literally, by overseeing the supply of nuts, bolts, screws and other fasteners used on virtually all its aircraft.”

 

Brown noted that military demand is about 2% of the global market for fasteners, which can make it difficult to attract major suppliers.

 

“It’s actually a significant challenge,” Brown was quoted in an industry day press release. “Frequently, we receive low-dollar value/low-volume requirements from the services. Well, it’s very difficult to get industry interested in supplying minimal quantities, unless they recognize that there is a compelling need from the warfighter for those small requirements.”

 

Often, in the case of major U.S. manufacturers and suppliers, Brown said it comes down to appealing to their patriotic sensibilities. “We go to them and say, ‘Guys, here’s the deal: we recognize that in the global perspective this is relatively small business. However, without these parts, the services can’t fly the missions they have to fly. How can we best partner to make this work for both you and for the military?’”

 

“It’s our responsibility to package it in such a way that it gives them both a profit motive and a patriotic motive, basically, to satisfy the military’s requirements,” Brown said.

 

“We may end up buying full production runs and satisfying small requirements with these longer term arrangements. It’s one of the ways that we can interest industry in doing business with us,” Brown said.

 

Procurement has been made more difficult by recent increases in commercial aircraft orders, long lead times for raw materials and price volatility, diversity of fasteners used by various weapons systems, restrictions on sources for critical safety items, and stringent technical, serialization and marking requirements.

 

“Critical safety items are considered single-point failure items. If that item fails, there are potentially catastrophic results,” Brown said. Due to their nature, those items must be purchased from approved sources.

 

“I briefed the Joint Aeronautical Logistics Commanders [JALC] and obtained their endorsement to allow us to make some smart business decisions and technical decisions on how we both describe and acquire those particular items,” Brown said. 

 

The JALC is comprised of senior military leaders in the aviation logistics community who serve in different branches, but share the goal of improving productivity and reducing cost by identifying and exploiting joint opportunities.

 

Brown said DLA was also able to help solve an issue between the Army’s aviation engineering community and commercial manufacturers as a result of Industry Day 2008. The Army wanted serial numbers on all CSIs.

 

“The engineering community doesn’t necessarily look at the manufacturing issues associated with certain things,” Brown said. “I had a quarter-inch bolt, and the Army wanted me to put a 15-digit serial number on the head of that bolt. Why? Where? How? It didn’t make a whole lot of sense.”

 

Brown went to the CSI Joint Service Working Group. “I identified the issue and they said, ‘You know what? That’s probably not a smart thing. We probably don’t need to serialize all standard items.’ And those are the kinds of issues that came out as a result of discussions during Industry Day,” he said.

 

Industry Day participants include Boeing, Lockheed Martin, SAIC, ALCOA, SPS Technologies, and other major suppliers, and newer vendors that have been performing well.

 

Although major suppliers receive a sizable portion of DLA’s fastener business, 63% of contracting actions and 43% of total dollars went to small business es.

 

Industry Day includes a problem resolution booth for payment problems, workshops covering topics such as long-term contracting, acquiring technical data, product data management, and DLA’s Qualified Suppliers List for Manufacturers (QSLM) and Qualified Suppliers List for Distributors (QSLD) programs. 

This year a second day was added to explore ways of satisfying warfighter needs on a long-term contracting basis. Web: dla.mil  ©2010 GlobalFastenerNews.com