LEGAL, GOVT. & REGULATORY ISSUES
How Human Capital
Challenge Can Benefit
from a Little Supply
Chain Perspective
Applying supply chain practices to the process in which
federal civilians are deployed
overseas, improves our
nation’s ability to deliver the
counterintelligence, military
logistics, and stabilization services needed in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Federal organizations understand that efficiencies can be realized in the
human capital elements of
civilian deployment, but higher service levels can be
achieved when leading supply
chain practices are leveraged
across deployment operations,
or what we term as “the
deployment chain.”
—Jim Lee, senior manager, Deloitte
Consulting LLP
ederal departments and agencies face a wide range of issues
when engaging in civilian deployment to war zones. Here are
some common challenges:
• Plan Requirements. Too often, organizations find themselves
lacking an accurate deployment plan, impairing the ability to effectively deliver the
right services, to the right customer, at the right time. By applying a demand planning concept to the current capacity of civilians, an agency was able to develop a
dynamic 18-month demand forecast of future civilian deployments based on the
skills required to deliver the service.
• Source Skills. Finding qualified civilians who are willing to deploy is an ongoing struggle due to the inherent dangers of living in a war zone. By establishing a
sourcing requirements process and database, a federal department was able to
counter this challenge by increasing their sourced fill rate by nearly 40 percent.
• Prepare Deployment. Training activities can be ineffective in readying civilians for the work required overseas. At one particular agency, only 55 percent
of the courses that were offered reflected the actual work performed. Ultimately, the quality of services delivered is largely dependent upon the quality
of training provided. Case in point: by applying Six Sigma techniques, a federal
department was able to establish a more effective civilian deployment training
program that reflected the actual requirements and needs of the Provincial
Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• Deploy Services. Manual processes can cause deployment scheduling
activities to become overly complex and time consuming, creating lengthy lead
times that can delay service delivery dates. One agency’s operations had spent
70 percent of its time in the manual scheduling of these activities. In stark contrast, another agency was able to reduce the same cycle times by 50 percent
through process automations enabled by the implementation of an enterprise
system to manage and track all scheduled deployments.
F
The Outlook
The requirement for deployed civilian services will endure. President Obama
declares the active need for a civilian expeditionary workforce and State
Department officials see the need for it to persist for at least another 5 to 10
years. Federal organizations will find that they may be better equipped to
address this enduring demand if they look to leading practices outside of the
human capital realm, such as supply chain management.
