Defense Logistics Agency Research and Development hosted senior leaders from across the agency to prioritize enterprise problem statements and identify opportunities for R&D to provide critical solutions during its annual Roundup Meeting June 10. The meeting was held here virtually between DLA Headquarters and DLA Aviation.

The Roundup is a culmination of R&D leaders’ annual spring visits to DLA’s major subordinate commands and directorates to exchange technical ideas and align their priorities with R&D’s programs. During the visits, R&D and senior leaders identified enterprise problem statements and ranked them according to DLA’s strategic plan and priorities including asset visibility, evolutionary culture, and manual warehouse tasks.

In his opening remarks, DLA Vice Director Brad Bunn stressed R&D’s importance to DLA’s future and how the Roundup drives R&D’s alignment and investment across the enterprise, which is critical in today’s dynamic environment.

“DLA is becoming a digital first organization,” he said. “Nothing is off the table as to where we will apply R&D’s capabilities to tackle the agency’s major problems and find solutions that have a clear, measurable benefit to the warfighter.”

DLA Chief Information Officer Adarryl Roberts shared many of Bunn’s sentiments, adding, “R&D needs to apply a problem-first approach to these enterprise problem statements instead of leading with shiny solutions.”

The senior leaders reviewed the list of 16 enterprise problem statements ranging from enterprise IT planning to scalable data and package sharing. They discussed each problem statements’ prioritization and ranking across three tiers, while carefully considering its return on investment and transformative impact from an enterprise-wide perspective.

R&D Director David Koch emphasized that R&D has current projects addressing several of the enterprise problem statements including critical material reclamation, Department of Defense interoperability, and manual acquisition processes.

“For R&D, it’s all about optimizing our delivery. We aim to maximize the value of these solutions for DLA,” he said.

R&D next steps are to document use cases and solutions, while ensuring consistency between projects. Senior leaders also agreed to improve transparent and agile R&D investments by tracking fiscal 2024-2026 project funding and applying outyear planning between 2027-2030 to enterprise problem statements.