In case you had not seen it, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a new report yesterday entitled “Defense Logistics: Army Should Track Financial Benefits Realized from its Logistics Modernization Program (GAO-14-51).”

According to the GAO, “LMP (Logistics Modernization Program) is an Army enterprise resource planning system that supports industrial operations conducted by AMC (Army Materiel Command) at its life cycle management commands and its maintenance, manufacturing, and storage sites…This report assesses the extent to which (1) LMP supports AMC’s industrial operations and (2) the Army has realized the expected benefits from deploying LMP.”

By way of background, the report states, “the Army initiated LMP in 1999 to replace two aging materiel management systems—the Commodity Command Standard System and the Standard Depot System. In replacing these systems, which had been used for more than 30 years to manage inventory, depot maintenance, and arsenal manufacturing operations, the Army expected LMP to help transform its logistics operations. A modified commercial off-the-shelf system, LMP was intended to support AMC industrial operations and improve business processes and practices in areas such as operations at depots and arsenals and inventory management. By providing a single source of data and integrated decision-making tools, LMP was expected to increase efficiencies in AMC operations—such as buying and managing spare and repair parts and conducting depot level maintenance. For example, in the area of planning future maintenance capacity, the Army expected improvements to AMC budget forecasts and adjustments through reduced repair cycle time, better resource allocation, increased production throughput, reduced production cost, and more accurate production schedules. With LMP’s deployment, the Army expected to achieve benefits that included reduced equipment repair times, improved inventory forecasting, and cost savings. Additionally, LMP is part of the Army’s broader strategy to implement enterprise resource planning systems in other areas and, as such, is expected to integrate with other Army systems, to include the General Fund Enterprise Business System and the Global Combat Support System-Army.”

The GAO went on to state that “to enable the Army to determine whether the expected financial benefits of LMP are being achieved, GAO recommends that the Army develop and implement a process to track the extent of financial benefits realized from the use of LMP during the remaining course of its life cycle. This process should be linked with the LMP performance baseline now being developed by the Army for use at AMC industrial sites. The Army concurred with GAO’s recommendation.”