This edition of Army Sustainment explores materiel management at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels. Materiel management is capabilities-centric; it requires commands to actively and effectively manage the Army's fleets of equipment.
As the Army's lead materiel integrator, the Army Materiel Command (AMC) is managing excess equipment and increasing supply chain efficiencies. It is doing this while supporting the Army in building brigade combat teams, security force assistance brigades, and equipment-on-hand readiness.
We at AMC must increase supply availability to provide breadth and depth to support formations in the field. Across the materiel enterprise, we are moving 1.2 million pieces of equipment in support of the chief of staff of the Army's strategy to build force structure.
We are constrained by fiscal and arbitrary metrics while readiness demands increase. Successful materiel management will require leaders at all levels to understand processes and ensure discipline in execution.
Synchronize and integrate--those are my responsibilities as the Army's senior logistician. From research to resale and supply to sustainment, it takes the total capabilities of the materiel enterprise to synchronize, integrate, and ultimately deliver materiel readiness. We synchronize our efforts to equip the Army with our partners in the Training and Doctrine Command, the Forces Command, the Army staff, and combatant commands.
Likewise, through our logistics enterprise resource planning systems, we integrate information to provide increased visibility that drives sustainment decision-making. Never before have Army systems provided the access to information and the clear picture of readiness that they do today.
At the strategic level, the Logistics Modernization Program incorporates supply chain, maintenance, repair, and overhaul solutions and integrates business processes across logistics systems Armywide. At the operational level, the Lead Materiel Integrator Decision Support Tool compares the Army's resources with validated, prioritized requirements, essentially matching supply with demand. And at the tactical level, the Global Combat Support System-Army (GCSS-Army) both modernizes and integrates operations within every warehouse, supply room, motor pool, and property book office across the force.
GCSS-Army is the most significant change to Army logistics in decades. Guided by the great vision of former logistics leaders, we have eliminated legacy systems and consolidated their functions into one system. The single system establishes a common operational picture for supply, maintenance, property, and tactical finance.
GCSS-Army ensures auditability, but more importantly, the system provides a critical capability to allow logistics leaders and units to have visibility of their equipment and readiness statuses. GCSS-Army takes materiel readiness to tactical units and provides them with insight into repair and parts supply statuses. It allows units to make informed decisions to improve Army readiness.
As we continue to field Wave 2 of GCSS-Army, we need commanders' support in prioritizing comprehension of the system. Leaders and Soldiers need to invest intellectual time and energy in understanding the system--the features, functionality, roles at each level, and available reports.
Warrant officers must become our technical experts and be proactive in training on the system across the Army. Users need to know how to best use GCSS-Army's capabilities to increase unit readiness. Only when we collectively become proficient in using GCSS-Army will we truly understand its capabilities and realize its potential to improve readiness.
Time is an invaluable resource, and as retired Lt. Gen. Mitchell Stevenson, a champion of GCSS-Army said, "Managing readiness is all about information." GCSS-Army provides near real-time data on unit equipment and maintenance and provides critical information on the status of unit equipment.
In the future, we will have business intelligence to get ahead of capabilities requirements. This data integration promotes accuracy and timeliness and allows the materiel enterprise to collectively provide materiel readiness.
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Gen. Gustave "Gus" Perna is the commander of AMC at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama.
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This article was published in the November-December 2017 issue of Army Sustainment magazine.
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