How often does the supply and procurement side sit down with specialists on the operational side to assess service to the users and upcoming needs?
Major procurements projects in terms of building a capability into a SOW/SOR is done by the various services by operators (Director Land Requirements, Director Air Requirements, Director Naval Requirements). ADM(Mat) in concert with PSPC do the procurement but largely "what to buy" is shaped by the various environments/end users. There is more nuance and stakeholders than that but procurement I would argue (along with many others) is not the issue. Rather, largely the issue is that Canada’s Defence Supply Chain (DSC) was designed with
a procurement and materiel life cycle focus and therefore is at odds with the customer (command) focus and agility required in an expeditionary force ( Mills, 2014 discussing Zimmer's 2008 analysis). So what we procure is less the issue, rather the issue is more how we manage supply chain relationships which is the backbone of Supply Chain Management.
(I adapted this from some other work I am doing, so if it seems not perfectly tailored apologies)
A bit of background to how we are orientated and organized to support CAF operations is in order to give some perspective to what Supply Chain management (SCM) means to the CAF. National Defence falls under two umbrellas ; The Dept of National Defence which is predominantly civilian in the form of ADM (Mat). Within ADM (Mat) there are equipment management divisions and supply chain directorate. On the equipment side they procure and support the various fleets (vehicles, ships, aircraft, weapons etc) while the supply chain directorate develops supply policies and procedures:
ADM (Mat) is the designated functional authority for [MA&S] and is responsible to develop all related policy, procedures, processes and training standards as well as ensuring compliance and oversight.”49 Essentially, the ADM (Mat) is responsible for the provisioning component of the supply chain, by acquiring equipment on behalf of the CF and filling the depots with the necessary stock to sustain it, and for the corporate level management function, to include the CFSS and performance management
On the CAF side there is an Canadian Material Support Group that oversees national stocks and the transportation system that moves material (and a few other things). In addition, each of the services (Navy, Army, Air Force) run and maintain bases that include regional and local warehouses and repair facilities and are linked into the national supply chain.
(look at OAG 2020 exhibit 3.1, which has an easy to understand diagram that lays this out, but I can't upload to the site for some reason)
So the CAF (CMSG) stores and moves equipment based on policy developed and managed by DND which is often at odds with environmental priorities and policies. To link back to issues surrounding DND/(ADM (Mat) holding the conch for in-service management means that CMSG holds stock that is often slow moving or dormant but still takes up space in our depots. So much material at one point that we were perilously close to being at 100% capacity leaving no room for additional stocks. This has an impact on other resources especially time, as we have to still account for that inventory through deliberate counts and other control measures on a regular basis. DND and the CAF has gone on a deliberate strategy to reduce these stocks but even with a plan at the strategic level, what what is held is managed by ADM(Mat) and at times they are very reluctant to remove items from the inventory (sometimes the environments are the issue as well). An example I was given, was there was a textile that we have almost 20,000 meters of that had zero demand in ten years that took some deliberate back and forth to dispose of and even then we kept 5000 meters "just in case".
The other issue is that at our strategic level we have a completely joint system whereas most other country's supply chains follow service lines (i.e. Navy, Army, and Air Force). This means at that strategic level there are competing priorities between the services that all place demand on the same finite amount of resources (Zima, 2012). Acerbating this is that as you can imagine across all the services their is an incredible amount of equipment all with their own unique NSNs that either needs holdings or a dedicated supply channel.
Simply put our management of relationships between all these stakeholders is weak and does not follow good SCM principles. Processes to order/move/fulfill demands internal to the CAF are also an issue but we do not own all the processes and many things are silo'd leaving different people holding the bag all with their own competing priorities. Our transportation tracking system for example does not communicate very well with DRMIS as it is a bespoke standalone system, same as our ammo management system.
Because there is no central controlling agency, we are left trying to piece things together ad hoc to fix these issues. It is not all bleak as there are some great projects on the go that are strengthening the relationships but also working on bringing silos in from the dark like
MISL and even rationalizing where inventory is located based on demand.
Some light reading if ya want to see some decent background papers which is where I got most of this material for another project I am doing
Zimmer, 2008
For Want of a Nail the Campaign was Lost’ DND’s Supply Chain: A State of Performance Paralysis,
Zima, 2012
A Canadian Revolution in Military Logistics – Improving the CF Operational Supply Chain Through Benchmarking
Mills, 2014
LOGISTICS: REDUCING FRICTION THROUGH UNDERSTANDING, INTEGRATION, AND OWNERSHIP
This raises a question that has interested me for some time: how does the system (software or whatever) correct for such a situation?
Does the system need a manual input to override or correct such a setting? And if so is there a policy/overwatch system in place to make such corrections on the thousands of disparate parts recorded in the system?
Or does the system itself (through some magical algorithm) self correct itself when a given parameter is exceeded?
At the end of the day any computer system will only do what you tell it to do, one of my mentors always laughs as there is a computer error code that one can utilize for write offs but he points outs that "computers don't make the errors, people feeding the info make them".
That aside SAP/DRMIS can absolutely tell you when you have stock outs, and other supply chain issues as ithas built in ability to do analytics (and can be linked to powerful visuals like Business Objects (BOBJ) but execution has to be done by folks at the strategic or tactical level (depending what they want to do). You can automate aspects of the system and many are but you still need real life people who know what they are doing making the corrections or determining what KPIs to monitor, which I would argue is where we suffer.
This is way outside the lanes of PRes Restructure so I apologize for the tangent.