CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas –
The DLA Distribution Corpus Christi, Texas team was named the Charlie Nye DLA Distribution Site of the Year for its across the board accomplishments and community spirit.
The Charlie E. Nye Award, named for the former DLA Distribution employee and DLA Hall of Fame inductee, recognizes superior performance at any distribution site having typical storage and distribution roles and responsibilities.
The distribution center’s Storage Branch distinguished itself through determination and dedication for consistent high performance, according to commander Army Lt. Col. Brian Richie. The division performed nearly 1.2 million picks to fill over 53,000 orders and stowed more than 106,000 receipts. The team pulled more than 940,000 items from six warehouses and five open storage lots geographically spread over 207 acres and packed them into more than 860,000 items for shipment to customers worldwide.
The Local Delivery Branch completed nearly 27,000 missions consisting of 83,550 pallets in support of local customers, while the Preservation, Packaging, Packing, and Marking Branch processed nearly 50,000 items to protect aviation assets valued at more than $2 billion.
Attacking their workload in a concerted effort, the Care Of Stock In Storage, or COSIS, team closed out more than 15,000 COSIS work orders representing a value of $884 million in changes to condition codes and national stock numbers. Recently, representatives from the Army Material Command’s Logistics Support Agency conducted a site visit to DLA Distribution Corpus Christi to perform Global Weight and Cube validations and evaluate the COSIS program. After the evaluation, they noted that DLA Distribution Corpus Christi, Texas, was the best distribution center they had visited and represented enterprise best practices others should benchmark.
In response to departmental shortfalls in manning, the distribution center created a Tiger Team to augment process branches. The internally-sourced team led to an increase in operational production, minimized the stress level of the impacted branch, motivated peers and streamlined operations to improve both Tailgate to Induction and Tailgate to Stow metrics for the year, said Richie.
“Pulling these resources internally from authorized positions permitted dedicated support augmentation to not only achieve improvement and stability, but also provided the distribution center with the workforce flexibility that reduced our dependence on overtime by nearly 90 percent,” he said.
The distribution center leadership also began automating production reports, providing vital information to supervisors to help them identify priority mission workload. “Through decisive actions, we were able to target high-priority Materiel Release Orders for swift attention, which ultimately reduced down time for aircraft and increased readiness rates across the rotary wing community,” said Richie.
The past year’s success is due to the distribution center’s resilient and professional workforce, according to Richie. “[The workforce’s] commitment to doing today’s work today in a safe and efficient manner is a direct result of our culture of professional excellence. Our working environment of taking care of one another extends beyond the distribution center.”
In 2016, the workforce donated over $15,000 to the Combined Federal Campaign and supported the Toys for Tots program as well as Operation Christmas Spirit, where employees donated their time during the holidays to deliver gifts and Christmas greetings to residents of local nursing homes.
“DLA Distribution Corpus Christi, Texas, truly encompasses DLA’s goals into everything we do. It is a standard practice to enhance Warfighter Support by delivering the right part to the right place, on time, every time. We remain committed to Stewardship Excellence by exploring all opportunities to perform the same work, more efficiently; and our emphasis on Workforce Development has enabled future professional and organizational growth. We are very proud to win this award,” concluded Richie.