Increasing Readiness and Production Throughput by Improving Defense Logistics Agency Consumable Item Availability

This research revealed that between Oct 00 and Nov 01, 49% (54 million) of the AF MICAP hours were for DLA managed items. DLA items had an average unit price per MICAP incident of $1,028 and an average unit price per MICAP hour of $4.50. For DLA items, 10% of the MICAP hours were for items costing less than $10, while 28% were for items that cost less than $50 and 86% of the MICAP hours were for items that cost less than $2,500. Furthermore, of the DLA items that had MICAP hours, 32% of the items are needed in aircraft, engine and accessory production processes. Last, stratifying the DLA records by AAC Code revealed that potentially 25% of the projected DLA sales are for items that DLA does not have stock on hand. In deriving these results, the research integrated 2.7 million records from the MICAP, EXPRESS, DLA, SBSS and G005M systems.


Seventeen AF weapon systems accounted for over 84% of the MICAP hours between Oct 00 to Nov 01. DLA provided files for these 17 weapon systems comprised of over 400,000 unique items projected to generate $700 million in sales per quarter--$2.8 billion for FY02. The AFLMA and OC-ALC provided complementary data that facilitated building a system view of each item. In total, this research found the same NIINs that cause MICAPs at bases also impact depot production. The research illustrated that managers can correlate the unit price of an item to the impact it has on support processes. The research concluded by identifying conditions that may cause future MICAPs and degrade production processes.