Defense Inventory

The secretary of each military department is required to submit to Congress a schedule for implementing best commercial inventory practices for the acquisition and distribution of secondary inventory items. A best commercial inventory practice is defined as a practice that enables military departments to reduce inventory levels while improving the responsiveness of the supply system to users' needs. Implementation of such best practices must be completed by October 2003. This report evaluates the Army's best practices implementation schedule, which was sent to Congress in June 1999. GAO (1) evaluates the extent to which that schedule responds to the provisions of the law and (2) identifies the specific elements of a management framework needed for effective implementation and oversight of the Army's best practice initiatives.

GAO noted that: (1) the Army's schedule is generally responsive to the act; (2) specifically, the schedule describes 18 initiatives that address the Army's inventory management functions, and for most of the initiatives, it provides for implementation to be completed within 5 years; (3) the initiatives are primarily aimed at improving the Army's information management, maintenance, and acquisition processes and transferring logistics activities to the private sector; (4) specific timeframes for full implementation of three of the initiatives were not included in the schedule; (5) therefore, GAO could not determine whether these initiatives are to be implemented within the required 5-year timeframe; (6) though generally responsive to the act's requirements, the schedule provides a management framework that lacks specific elements such as an overall strategy and outcome-oriented goals and performance measures; (7) while the initiatives are generally guided by the Army's Revolution in Military Logistics, there is no comprehensive strategy or plan that guides the efforts; (8) consequently, no detailed framework exists to increase the likelihood that the initiatives are coordinated and do not conflict or duplicate efforts; (9) also, there are no specific performance goals established to measure the overall results of the initiatives; (10) in GAO's prior work, GAO noted that the lack of a detailed management framework contributed to the Department of Defense's (DOD) difficulty in implementing new initiatives; (11) without a more effective management framework, opportunities for oversight by Congress and DOD managers would be limited since meaningful evaluations of progress and results would be impossible; and (12) the Government Performance and Results Act offers a model for developing an effective management framework to assess the results of the initiatives and improve the likelihood of successful implementation and assessment.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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