Improved Acquisition Process

Case_7_Army_Card_Process.pdf

Problem

In today’s military operations, the concern over constrained budgets and the need for timely resource decisions has driven the need for changes in the current process used to buy equipment and supplies. By direction from the assistant secretary of the Army for financial management and comptroller (ASA (FM&C)) and the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics, and technology (ASA (ALT)), the Army began to review the acquisition process in 2006 in order to identify opportunities to standardize the process and reduce cycle time.

The first step was to form a Lean Six Sigma team to find inefficiencies and waste, and to drive improvements. The team included subject matter experts from ASA (FM&C), ASA (ALT), program managers, and representatives from the Office of the Secretary of Defense Cost Analysis Improvement Group (CAIG). The team determined that improving the process for preparing the Cost Analysis Requirements Document (CARD) would be their first step in speeding up the acquisition process.

The CARD is a document that is included in each major Category I program and is required in order to pass through the milestone decision review process. The responsible program manager creates the CARD which is then used to describe the prominent features of the acquisition program and the system being acquired. More importantly, the CARD serves as the basis for the life cycle cost estimate for the system being acquired.

Approach

The team followed Lean Six Sigma’s well-established Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control (DMAIC) methodology to define the project’s scope, gather voice of the customer information, develop a data collection survey, and establish metrics. Within this methodology, several different LSS techniques (commonly known as “tools”) were used. For example, the data collection effort enabled the team to develop a Suppliers, Inputs, Process, Outputs, and Customers (SIPOC) map that helped them understand how the CARD preparation process was currently operating.

The team was also able to use the SIPOC map to prioritize and develop a primary metric for the CARD process and to develop a Responsible, Accountable, and Consulted, Informed (RACI) chart that gave the team and stakeholders a clear communication plan.

A Cause – and – Effect diagram was next used to discover root causes of the defects in the process and a Design of Experiments (DoE) analysis was used to understand and reduce variation. The team was able to determine that 12 specific CARD sections could be standardized and formatted in Microsoft Word and aligned with the master CARD document format.   These process changes enabled each section of the CARD to be developed in parallel and then be merged together to complete the final document.

 Results

The team was able to eliminate waste and reduce the man-hours needed to complete a CARD from 4,372 to 3,060-- a 30% decrease.  This accomplishment enabled approximately $92,000 to be removed from the cost of completing each CARD. Since several of these documents are prepared each year within the Army, substantial cost avoidance was achieved.