FORT BELVOIR, Va. – The Defense Logistics Agency is looking to expand use of a process mining tool after a successful pilot provided insights to improve a key business process for customer orders.
During the two-year, multi-phased project, DLA created a process digital twin to evaluate ways to simplify the steps, increase automation and improve auditability in its order-to-cash process.
“A process digital twin mirrors a sequence of actions and provides a ‘digital x-ray’ of a process which captures every stage, activity and disparity,” said Senthil Arul, a program manager in DLA Research and Development. “When we can visualize how processes function end to end, we can more easily recognize inefficiencies and gaps and look for ways to improve performance.”
DLA R&D worked with a team of experts from across the agency, including DLA Aviation, DLA Energy and DLA Logistics Operations, to analyze over 13 million sales orders and over 500 gigabytes of data from DLA-managed supply chains. This allowed them to better understand the unique steps from when DLA receives an order to when a customer receives material.
“The goals of the pilot were to identify steps that impact processing times, look for opportunities to automate manual and repetitive tasks and track in real-time how changes in systems, business logic and user experience can impact DLA operations,” DLA R&D Deputy Director Martina Johnson said.
By reviewing patterns in payments and customers, DLA discovered over 40,000 process variations, highlighting the complexity of supporting its Defense Department and whole-of-government customers. With this data in hand, the DLA team analyzed anomalies to detect root causes and programmed the tool to simulate potential solutions.
“The pilot successfully showed us the capabilities this technology could bring to improve other business systems we use in the agency,” Johnson said. “As we move forward, we’re looking for opportunities to make our processes more standard, automated and user friendly.”
With the conclusion of the pilot, DLA is moving the capability to a production environment with its Program Executive Office. Starting in February, DLA organizations can send proposals for business system use cases to the platform. This will provide process users with access to the tool for analyzing other supply chain systems and data, DLA Enterprise Advanced Analytics Program Manager Michael LeBreton said.
“Expanding the capability beyond the pilot program to additional process areas through a full-scale production platform supports key modernization efforts aligned to DLA’s strategic plan,” DLA R&D Director David Koch said. “This will allow us to evaluate processes across the agency in support of our digital-business transformation initiatives.”
One such system expected to be reviewed in the future includes the Warehouse Management System which could help DLA examine its inventory, supply, distribution and warehousing processes to understand how materiel can be more effectively positioned to best support the mission.
DLA Finance and other directorates are also interested in exploring how the tool could help identify what triggers an audit finding in their business processes so they can develop better internal controls and enhance accountability to meet audit goals, Johnson said.
“Embracing advanced technology to improve our decision advantage, adaptability and resiliency is key to DLA’s success,” DLA Chief Information Officer Adarryl Roberts said. “The data-driven insights we learn from this capability will help us more efficiently align our resources across supply chains and lead to more informed operational and transformation decisions.”
All of these efforts improve daily operations and solidify DLA’s commitment to future-ready logistics, he added.