Anniston Army Depot, Ala. - A ceremony held yesterday officially activated DLA Land at Anniston, transferring 38 employees from Anniston Army Depot to DLA Land and Maritime, which is headquartered in Columbus, Ohio.
The transition is the result of a 2005 Base Realignment and Closure decision.
The employees, members of the Directorate of Material Management’s Receiving and Storage Branch, will continue to perform the same job duties, just for a different Army command.
“Much dialogue has occurred since we began this journey in 2005 and, over the last year, I can say we’ve become better acquainted,” said Jack Cline, the depot deputy to the commander. “I realize this can be an anxious time for those personnel who are impacted by standing up this new organization. But, I do believe this will be an unrelenting great relationship, and one that is transparent to our customers.”
Brig. Gen. Darrell Williams, commanding general of DLA Land and Maritime, agreed with Cline, calling the process a “seamless transition.”
“You will stay in place, accomplish the same jobs, and, more importantly, deal and work with the same Army and the same personnel you have been working with every day here at Anniston,” Williams said to the employees.
Williams discussed how appropriate transition of a storage and distribution site at Anniston Army Depot was, given the installation’s rich history in storage and maintenance missions.
During the ceremony, Cline told the new DLA employees how vital they have been, and will continue to be, to ANAD’s mission.
“We depend on you as an organization,” Cline said during the ceremony. “We’ve come to depend on your skills and the warfighters are depending on the finished product.”
ANAD’s sister depot, Tobyhanna Army Depot went through a similar process last year when 40 of their employees also transferred to DLA.
“At Tobyhanna, the employees stayed in the same building at the same workstation in the same seats. Nothing changed except their badges,” said George Frye of Tobyhanna.
Gentris Mosley, branch chief of receiving and storage, said that is exactly the way things will work here in Anniston as well.
“Even the name will stay the same, so we’ll be easy to find,” said Mosley.
On April 5, Maj. James Godfrey, provisional commander for the organization, arrived. He is a division chief for Army Industrial Support in Columbus, Ohio, and has overseen the transition.
Godfrey said the branch’s employees were “top notch” and he forsees them continuing to work well under DLA.
According to Phillip Dean, chief of the depot’s Integrated Logistics Support Office, the transfer is the culmination of many years of preparation since the BRAC decision was announced.
“We were told by DLA personnel this was the smoothest of all the Army transfers,” said Dean.
The receiving and storage branch is responsible for receiving material from off depot " mostly tank parts " storing and pulling parts from storage when needed by their customers, the shops in the Nichols Industrial Complex.
“Almost everything that comes onto the depot, if it isn’t going to Bldg. 362, it comes to us,” said Mosley.
To assist employees with the storage and retrieval mission in a timely manner, nine robots, referred to as Automatic Guided Vehicles, move throughout the building navigated by invisible sensor wires built into the floors.
Material handlers unload trucks, tag the materials and scan them in, separate them into boxes and place them in storage. When items are pulled for delivery to a shop, they are scanned again to account for the time it takes from receipt to delivery.
“Most of the time, if we get a part in on Monday or Tuesday, it is out by Friday,” said Mosley.
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