PHILADELPHIA –
From Texas to Maine and Japan, the Defense Logistics Agency Troop Support expedited nearly five dozen mattresses to sailors aboard a Navy ship and submarine, respectively, last month.
To fill two urgent orders, the Clothing and Textiles supply chain worked closely with customers and a third-party logistics vendor storing the mattresses in a warehouse in Austin, Texas.
Wilhemina “Mina” Hubbard, a customer account specialist on C&T’s customer readiness team, facilitated the first requisition for 46 mattresses needed on the USS New Orleans.
“Initially the customer submitted his requisitions as a normal requirement, and he reached out to us about a week before Christmas saying, ‘I need to have this expedited because we’re about to get underway in about 10 days, so I need to have the mattresses onboard the ship,’” Hubbard said.
Hubbard ensured the mattresses made it to the customers in Sasebo, Japan, by their critical deadline Jan. 16, she said.
Theresa Gonzalez, a customer account specialist also on C&T’s customer readiness team, facilitated a second urgent request for 12 mattresses needed on the USS North Dakota at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine, early January.
“The requisition came in on a Monday, I reached out to the 3PLs on Tuesday, and we had (the mattresses) to (the customers) by Friday,” Gonzalez said.
Hubbard and Gonzalez’s supervisor, Kevin Mackenzie, and division chief, Richard Miller, praised their fast-acting support and described them as ‘elite’ customer support team members.
“The ladies do a fantastic job in just this kind of emergency situation,” Miller said.
Navy ship customers are unique as they’re not stationed in one place, so the urgency is in getting them items while they’re docked. They also don’t have storage, Gonzalez said.
“When they’re at sea, they can’t get items, and their mission changes, so that’s why we have to react so quickly,” Miller said. “When they finally dock, they have a window to get items.”
Mattresses are stocked items with a contract in place to ship directly to customers as requirements come in, and manually assisting with expedited orders is common, Hubbard explained.
“It’s what we do every day,” Hubbard said. “In the blink of an eye a requirement can go from being a normal, routine requisition to (a customer saying), ‘I have to have this tomorrow,’ and that customer could be on the other side of the world, but we make it happen.”
Hubbard and Gonzalez both worked with C&T’s 3PL contracting team to support transportation costs, as the items didn’t go through a consolidation point, like a typical order, Hubbard explained.
“Any time we have a requirement that requires additional transportation charges outside of the ‘norm,’ we have to get approval from the contracting specialist,” Hubbard said.