Personnel Assignment Efficiency

U.S. Army Central Command routinely sends personnel to locations all over the world for temporary assignments. In many cases, mission accomplishment at these locations is placed on hold until the personnel arrive. It was found that nearly 100 percent of the requests for temporary duty needed rework of some kind, and that the approval process was taking more than two weeks. LSS was used to redefine the request and approval process and eliminate the rework. A 33 percent reduction in cost was realized. Requests were approved much more efficiently and personnel were able to get to where they were needed much quicker.

Problem
U.S. Army Central Command (ARCENT) provides support services to in-theater Army forces as well as directed Army support to other military services. ARCENT also conducts theater security cooperation activities and provides a forward- based Army component to plan and conduct land operations across its area of responsibility (AOR—the Middle East). Further, ARCENT supports force rotations, conducts receptions, staging and onward movements, and provides in-theater sustainment to forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa.

Due to ARCENT's broadly scoped mission, it often needs to send personnel too many continental U.S. (CONUS) and outside-the-U.S. (OCONUS) locations for short to medium term assignments. This includes both civilian and military personnel. In many cases, functions at these assignment locations are placed on hold until the temporary personnel arrive; thus negatively impacting mission effectiveness. The Temporary Duty (TDY) assignment process is critical to ARCENT supplying short to medium term personnel to support its mission. The issue ARCENT faced was that the process to draft and approve a TDY request took too long, made inefficient use of manpower and involved rework. At one point in time, the TDY process met the needs of ARCENT, but it no longer did and needed improvement to support ARCENT's growing mission.

Approach
This project was important to leadership and it was determined that a team would use Lean Six Sigma's Kaizen approach to quickly obtain a solution. The team mapped the current process and collected data to measure it. This effort included sampling four months of data which included 1,173 records from the Defense Travel System (DTS) and 80 "paper" TDY requests to determine process cycle time and first pass yield. The team found that nearly 100% of TDY requests required rework of some kind during the submission and review process. The current cycle time was just over two business weeks. Due to inadequate instructions in request forms, the ARCENT Chief of Staff (the final approval authority) needed to initiate rework to obtain additional information to complete requests. On average, this added another 2.5 days of rework.

In addition to the two-week average cycle time, there were many cases where the process took more than two months to complete. The team reviewed the sources of rework and then redefined the required information for a TDY request. The team worked this into new TDY request forms and improved ARCENT's use of the Defense Travel System. In addition to understanding the sources of in-process rework, the team also defined the types of errors per input from the Chief of Staff. A new process was implemented with clear requirements and better use of information technology resources. Pilot results found that the average cycle time was reduced to one business week and the number of "stalled" requests was significantly reduced. Since rework was almost entirely eliminated, the batching of requests for Chief of Staff approval was eliminated in favor of continuous submission as requests were received (one- piece flow). This eliminated waiting time for requests that previously had entered the queue first.

Results
The team implemented the new process at the conclusion of the 2.5 month project. ARCERNT realized a $250,000 cost reduction over the four-year budget cycle. This was a 33 percent reduction in process costs. The new process reduced non-value-added review and rework activities, and provided CONUS and OCONUS locations with needed temporary personnel in much shorter time.