Military administration and procurement, by its nature, has always required a strict level of discipline in terms of record keeping, access and storage. In the last two decades, the demand for efficient solutions has soared. Two wars and other military campaigns around the globe have increased the demand on procurement officials. Similarly, political back-and-forth and uncertain long-term budgeting issues have put pressure on administration and storage agencies to ensure the right equipment is ready when needed, without a glut of overstock.
One solution is storage. Smart storage can significantly reduce clutter and give military procurement officials the flexibility required to respond to constantly changing needs. However, as any military procurement official can tell you, storage isn’t always as simple as dumping everything into a single storage facility and then making a quick pickup when needed. Needs are complex, and time isn’t always on your side.
Below, learn more about how the right storage option can take some of the strain off military agencies bombarded by new orders and changing procurement requirements.
Strict Accounting Requirements
Bureaucracies are complicated things. The only way to maintain order is to closely track every resource — manpower, money, supplies, you name it. Even among countless government agencies, no group is under the same level of scrutiny as military. After all, supplies range from commodities to deadly weapons; every last item must be accounted for. Without the right storage option, accounting can be hugely time-consuming if not downright hopeless. Storage options as simple as weapons and media cabinets or mechanical carousels for paper documents can greatly simplify efforts for tracking and accounting for military supplies.
Efficiency
Accountability is certainly important, but so is functionality. As important as military operations and national security are, it’s crucial that military procurement officials are as efficient as possible. In that regard, accessibility is key. Movable storage can be a huge timesaver and help to fill military supplies orders much more quickly. Businesses like Patterson Pope and others specialize in such storage options as universal weapons racks and storage carts that make it much easier to move items quickly. Efficiency also means cost effectiveness. The less time personnel have to spend searching through inefficient storage, the more resources that can be devoted elsewhere.
Short Lead Times
Unlike many other government agencies, lead times for military procurement offices are not always so flexible. Orders can change with little to no lead time, and you must be ready to meet the demand as quickly as possible. For that reason, accessible storage and smart sorting is crucial to everyday operations. Customizable storage options can help to keep items grouped in the smartest way possible without taking up too much space. The right style of sorting can make all the difference when facing a complex last-minute request for military supplies. Intuitive design should be a top priority.
Changing Needs
The United States puts a high priority on new technologies — think supplies that are more compact and lightweight, or weapons that are larger than their predecessors. In turn, that means supplies that are in high demand today could be near obsolete tomorrow. Such rapid turnover in technology complicates the job of a military procurement office. On one hand, you must anticipate new incoming supplies that don’t necessarily fit the mold of what is being replaced. On the other hand, procurement officials should never assume (and typically do not have the luxury of assuming) that the “obsolete” supplies will be phased out entirely or can be discarded. For that reason, storage options should be flexible enough to embrace changing needs without a total overhaul.
Budget Uncertainty
Being caught in a political tug-of-war doesn’t help matters. On top of changing requirements and last-minute requests, military procurement officials also must do their best to anticipate future budget constraints. Naturally, the tools to blunt the inconvenience of sudden budget changes are limited, but with the right storage options in place you can continue to do your job as efficiently as circumstances allow.
It might not be the most top-of-mind priority for military procurement officials, but proper storage can save money, reduce employee stress levels and significantly improve overall operations.
Denny Hammack is the CEO of Patterson Pope, leveraging his 25 years of experience dealing with document filing, business storage and records management solutions. Patterson Pope is a professional storage solutions business, helping customers with organization, efficiency and space.
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Mr. Hammack,
Your article makes perfect sense, but I feel you’re targeting the wrong crowd. Procurement officials are not the people you need to address. I know because I am one. Procurement officials simply procure supplies and services in accordance with Federal Regulations. The items they procure are determined by the user of the equipment in need. In other words, procurement officials don’t buy things for themselves, they buy things for the war fighters.
For what it’s worth, I recommend that you post products that could possibly create a solution to a problem war fighters don’t yet know about. If an end users sees a product that can fulfill a need, they can put a procurement package together and pass it up their chain of command and on to the procuring official who can legally obligate federal dollars. I don’t doubt that your company is anything less than successful and will therefore bode well during the market research phase of the procurement.
There’s a bunch of other logistic stuff to consider here. As things currently work, it’s not just a matter of storing stuff. There are deeply imbedded current practices involving “life cycle management”, durability codes, “demand history” stats and a bunch of other things the Loggies can weigh in on.
There are also very strong institutional pressures AGAINST economy and fiscal responsibility in the military – careers are not built on saving the taxpayer’s money, but on having the newest and shiniest.
We could (and do!) have warehouses full of perfectly serviceable “stuff”, but it happens to be in “old” color” or is “old school”, so rather than being issued it is on the slow boat to DRMO. Additionally, industry and politicians apply powerful pressures to maintain a steady flow-throw of “new stuff”.
Actually, I like reading stuff like this. When I came off the road and into training administration, something as simple as making sure that we had a sufficient humber of Sam Browne belts in the correct variety of sizes was a headache I’d never had before, let alone where to put them, inventory them, calculate life cycle and return on investment. Everybody bitches about the bean counters until they become one, I know I did. Then I found out that ammo doesn’t grow on trees, and that cases of it take up space and weigh a lot, that for some reason BandAids have an expiration date, and if you keep fusees on the range for night fire you can’t store them in the range building because the summer humidity will ruin them, along with making paper targets extra flaccid and staples rusty.
Nothing can be simple.
Storage, administration, and issue/accountability procedural requirements are always afterthoughts. Which they shouldn’t be, especially with items like weapons.
For the life of me, I completely fail to understand why the hell we don’t require the people developing and designing these things to supply complete packages, in terms of things like support equipment and so forth.
Case in point: The M16/M4 rack system. The old M12 was a joke; the rack worked only for arms rooms settings, and provided no transit protection at all for the weapons. If you had to ship weapons, you had to come up with some sort of bullshit packing system in footlockers or something, and you’d occasionally find yourself in receipt of a broken pile of plywood and weapons parts at very inopportune moments. We sent off a funeral detail to rural Montana, once, and those poor bastards had the cargo handler drop their footlocker o’ guns from a forklift, leaving them with severe problems in getting back to Fort Lewis–The LT in charge of the party wound up having to put several hundred dollars worth of plastic gun cases from Walmart, K-Mart, and a couple of other places on his credit card, in order to get back to home station. And, the poor bastard never got reimbursed for it, either.
Admin and issue stuff is always an afterthought–For the life of me, I don’t understand why there isn’t a slot on the M16 or M4 buttstock for a dog tag, retained by a screw, that would get all the admin info like unit, zero data, and admin number stamped on it. Instead, there’s twenty different half-ass methods of painting or otherwise marking the stocks, none of which tell you much worthwhile, and most of which do violence to any camouflage efforts you make.
Why the hell aren’t we building racks that can double as transit cases, and which add some value to the process? The Marines bar-code all their crap for inventory and issue–The Army ought to be doing the same, along with automating tracking for maintenance. Build some chargers for the sight electronics into those cases, enable wi-fi, and you could do some real good for tracking actual use and maintenance data. Hell, make the cases read out what’s in them as a rapid means of checking accountability, and have the whole thing automated, so that PFC Schmuckatelli can concentrate on doing his more important tasks as an armorer, like maintenance, instead of devoting half his working life to daily accountability. Build the damn thing into an app, and the commander can query his arms room automation to find out what the issue status is on any of his weapons, and how many are out on issue vs. in his arms room.
By this point, we should be able to do cradle-to-grave tracking on all these things. Why the hell aren’t we?