Conducting "business as usual" is out of step with today's rapid-fire, global economy. Velocity Management in Logistics and Distribution: Lessons from the Military to Secure the Speed of Business alerts commerce to the new reality that it must be more flexible and responsive in managing the unpredictability of its environment, particularly when it
Velocity management brought a new way of doing business to U.S. Army logistics, with a renewed focus on the Army customer and an approach for process improvement that cuts across time, quality, and cost. The authors reveal the motivations, methodology, and management structure behind the initiative; the process improvements that have led to such quick and impressive results; and the steps that have been taken to develop and institutionalize the capabilities needed to achieve and sustain future improvement. Lessons learned can be readily adapted for other business models.
When work began on the first volume ofthis text in 1992, the science of dis tribution management was still very much a backwater of general manage ment and academic thought. While most of the body of knowledge associated with calculating EOQs, fair-shares inventory deployment, productivity curves, and other operations management techniques had long been solidly established, new thinking about distribution management had taken a definite back-seat to the then dominant interest in Lean thinking, quality management, and business process reengineering and their impact on manufacturing and service organizations. For the most part, discussion relating to the distri bution function centered on a fairly recent concept called Logistics Manage ment. But, despite talk of how logistics could be used to integrate internal and external business functions and even be considered a source of com petitive advantage on its own, most of the focus remained on how companies could utilize operations management techniques to optimize the traditional day-to-day shipping and receiving functions in order to achieve cost contain ment and customer fulfillment objectives. In the end, distribution manage ment was, for the most part, still considered a dreary science, concerned with oftransportation rates and cost trade-offs. expediting and the tedious calculus Today, the science of distribution has become perhaps one of the most im portant and exciting disciplines in the management of business.
This book examines the Army's role in the war on terrorism; the Army's homeland security needs; the implications of increased emphasis on Asia; the Army's role in coalition operations; the unfinished business of jointness-the lessons learned from operations and how to prepare for the future; the Army's deployability, logistical, and personnel challenges; and whether the Army can afford its Transformation. These examinations are bracketed by an introduction, a description of the Army's place in the new national security strategy, and a summary of the authors' conclusions.
