Army set to roll out its logistics app in July
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After months of delays, the Army's Wholesale Logistics Modernization Program is finally ready to go live.
After months of delays, the Army's Wholesale Logistics Modernization Program is finally ready to go live.
Next month, nearly 4,000 users at 12 sites will begin using LOGMOD, said Larry Asch, chief of the program's Business and Operations Office at the Communications-Electronics Command at Fort Monmouth, N.J. Most of the users are at CECOM and at the Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania, Asch said.
The enterprise resource planning system, originally slated to launch in February, culls data from two 30-year-old mainframe databases, the Commodity Command Standard System and the Standard Depot System. The legacy Cobol systems process data in batches using flat files.
Testing went slower than anticipated, Asch said, with the Army and lead contractor Computer Sciences Corp. ironing out interface problems as well as needing more time for subcontractor SAP America Inc. of Newtown Square, Pa., to customize the system by merging two products.
Learning on the job
'Whenever you do enterprise resource planning, it's always constant learning as you go along,' he said. As the tests stalled because of concerns with some features'particularly the requisitions receiving, long-term planning and acquisitions areas'the Army and CSC decided to do further reviews, Asch said.
'We have a lot of interfaces that we have to develop and test, so we decided jointly that we needed more time,' he said.
All users should be on the new system by March, Asch said. The total number of users will be between 18,000 and 20,000. The legacy systems will be phased out after LOGMOD becomes fully operational.
Kevin Carroll, Army program executive officer for enterprise information systems, described the delay as typical for any large modernization effort.
Through the switch to LOGMOD, the Army wants to shorten logistics turnaround time. The system, which CSC is developing under a $680 million, 10-year contract, is intended to track assets, orders and deliveries worldwide in real time.
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