New warehouse management system helps DLA track materials, ship them to the warfighter more efficiently

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. That includes automated identification technology, as well as barcode and RFID scanning. Perry Knight, deputy commander of DLA Distribution, said DLA Distribution is a little more than halfway through fielding these new systems, while Col. Woodje Caldwell, deputy director of DLA’s Disposition Services, said he’d 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 RFID 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 is actually accounted for. That said, some of that property gets repurposed outside of the DoD, often by state and local governments. RFID helps ensure that property gets to where it’s going quickly and efficiently.

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

“So we’ll have a greater, I believe, ability to use those to capture all the pertinent data. We’ll know where they are located at,” 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 manpower and time needed to achieve that.

How automation helps

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. In this facility, that robotic arm is capable of removing items from the warehouse’s internal system for moving items around, package them together, and deliver them internally in the warehouse to be shipped externally. DLA Distribution is also working on an auto facility with similar automated robotic delivery capabilities.

Caldwell said DLA’s deployment teams have come in to every facility to train them on the new warehouse management system, and ease them into a level of comfort with the new technologies. That increased confidence on the part of the workforce has also contributed to improved efficiencies. 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. And people have embraced it and 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.”

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