Fort Belvoir, Virginia –
The 1990s were a turning point in Ivan Hall’s career. The Defense Logistics Agency was facing a mounting problem as readiness and response times climbed for spare parts from the Defense Supply Center Columbus, Ohio, now known as DLA Land and Maritime.
“We had to increase the speed of what we were doing, and keep improving the quality of the products that we were sending,” said Hall, then the deputy director of land supplier operations. “But we just couldn’t do the onesies and twosies anymore; we had too much volume coming in. And we had to manage and award multiple [national stock numbers], not just a single NSN, at a time so we had to start doing long-term contracts.”
As the driving force behind the development and implementation of the first corporate long-term contracts awarded by DLA for each of the three original equipment manufacturers, Ivan Hall will be inducted into the DLA Hall of Fame at the McNamara Headquarters Complex July 14.
During his tenure, Hall coordinated three groundbreaking contracts: the General Dynamics Land Systems, United Defense Limited Partnership and the O’Gara Hess contracts, in what he affectionately referred to as the “Mighty Land.” These contracts, which saw months shaved from their administrative lead times, also opened DLA’s doors to future long-term contracts with other OEMs, he said.
“No one was doing long-term contracts at the time; it was kind of brand new, so it was challenging,” he said. “Once we got them on contract, then we didn’t have to go out and contract for each item. Every NSN had a lead time of record, and the lead time on all of those items went from almost 180 days down to 30 days so we saved hundreds and hundreds of days of administrative lead time on each one.”
The awarding of the Fleet Automotive Support Initiative regional contract, which Hall considers one of his biggest accomplishments, soon followed. The unique five-year prime vendor support contract called for repairs and spare parts for different kinds of weapon systems, reducing lead times and creating significant cost savings.
“It impacted so many customers,” he said. “It was a big-volume contract, and it impacted the whole logistics process.”
Wherever Hall went, awards followed. In 2002, the DSCC’s Customer Wait Time Team, under his leadership, won the DLA Top 10 Team Award. That same year, the first DSCC Readiness Academy, championed by Hall, provided training to hundreds of personnel.
“The academy was put together to make people more aware of weapon-system readiness and their impact on weapon-system readiness as contracting people,” he said.
In 2007, Hall’s Customer Pay Team won one of DLA’s highest honors, the DLA Director’s Award for Organizational Excellence, and in 2009, an M2 machine gun process improvement team formed under Hall’s guidance won the Federal Executive Association Outstanding Team Award.
In addition, Hall is credited with sending the first DLA Land and Maritime product specialists to key Army industrial sites in 2008. Shortly after, in July 2009, he retired as the field activity’s director of land supplier operations.
After 30 years with DLA, Hall said he is honored and humbled by his nomination into the DLA Hall of Fame.
“I felt good about what I did with the agency,” he said. “When you reflect back what the agency does, the huge amount, the volume that we deal with in the various different commodities, bringing all that together is a humongous task, and we do it so well. That’s the bottom line of what we do in DLA.”
Hall’s tenure at DLA began as a quality assurance specialist at the Defense Contract Management Command in Detroit in 1979. After serving as the director of quality assurance in Cleveland, Chicago and Indianapolis, he came to Defense Supply Center Columbus in 1995. Prior to serving as the director and deputy director of land supplier operations, he held a variety of positions, including director of the product test center, deputy director of the land-based weapon systems group and deputy director of the maritime applications group.
Note: This is the first of five features on former DLA team members being inducted into the agency’s Hall of Fame in a July 14 ceremony.