The Defense Logistics Agency is strengthening its internal controls and financial practices, while simultaneously tracking inventory more accurately and moving it more efficiently by implementing new warehouse management systems.

The WMS includes automated identification technology, as well as barcode and radio frequency identification scanning. Perry Knight, deputy commander of distribution at DLA, said the distribution team by late summer was a little more than halfway through fielding the new systems. Meanwhile, Col. Woodje Caldwell, deputy director of disposition services at DLA, said his team had recently completed the implementation.

“It really is a state of the art system designed in a modular sort of way that brings the focus for us — brings the goods to person — to eliminate a lot of the inaccuracies in visibility that we had in the past,” Knight said on The Modernized Warehouse.

Caldwell said Disposition Services is primarily focused on the barcode capabilities, particularly making them more user friendly. Because Disposition Services is in charge of disposal of Defense Department materials, tracking inventory as accurately as possible is important to ensure that everything marked for disposition can be accounted for.

Some of that property gets repurposed outside of DoD, often by state and local governments. Using barcodes compliant with military standards helps ensure that property gets to where it’s going quickly and efficiently, Caldwell said.

Meanwhile, DLA Distribution, which focuses on getting materials to warfighters and other DoD personnel, is planning a pilot for automated inventory using radio frequency identification. Knight said that will involve using drones to pick up the RFID signals and verify quantity and locations. The approach will be particularly useful in situations where an item has to be temporarily moved, like a vehicle undergoing maintenance, he said.

“We’ll have a greater ability to use [RFID] to capture all the pertinent data. We’ll know where [our items] are located,” he said on the Federal Drive with Tom Temin. “And certainly on any given day, or whatever frequency we determine, be able to determine that we have the right quantity that is on record in our automated record systems.”

In that way, DLA hopes to gather more information about its inventory while simultaneously reducing the staff and time needed to manage its inventory logistics.

How automation helps with DLA inventory management

Knight also hopes automation will make it easier for workers to pick and ship items.

“Let me give you an instance: For our scan guns that we have today, it will tell a worker whether they’re at the right bin face, where that material is stored, either to stow it, to put it away or to actually pick it for movement or shipment to a DOD or whole-of-government entity,” he said. “It really does increase the speed. We’ve employed voice technology for a little over two years now. Certainly, it has helped improve the accuracy. They are at the right place to pick the right item. There’s even a photograph or picture, if you will, of that particular item to ensure that they have it.”

The next step down this path, which Knight said is being fielded at one facility currently, is the use of robotic arms to improve the efficiency of the picking process. The robotic arm is capable of removing items from the warehouse’s internal system for moving items around, packaging them together and delivering them internally in the warehouse to be shipped externally.

DLA Distribution is also working on a facility with similar automated robotic delivery capabilities.

Caldwell said DLA’s deployment teams have come into every facility to train them on the new WMS and ease users into a level of comfort with the new technologies. That increased confidence on the part of the workforce has also contributed to improved efficiencies, he said. But that training is not always a quick or easy process.

“Folks naturally fall into a rut. and they get comfortable with how we do things. So as we upgraded and we incorporated WMS right, it’s the whole fear of the unknown,” Caldwell said.

But the new WMS is taking hold. “Our workforce has really embraced it and risen to the challenge of incorporating WMS within our processes,” he said. “They understand the why, and they see the benefit of incorporating WMS as our system.”

Discover technologies and tactics that other federal agencies are taking to modernize their logistics and warehouse operations in our series The Modernized Warehouse.

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