Defence E Mall: A One Stop Shop

As a part of its Revolution in Military Logistics (RML) and logistic transformation, USA’s Department of Defence has harnessed the power of IT enabled logistics by adopting E- commerce for most of its inventory functions. One of the game changing initiatives has been the establishment of an Electronic Mall (E-Mall) which is a web based online ordering, platform built to provide a secure full service e-Commerce site for its  military customers. The E-Mall offers over 65 million items, delivering a streamlined and cost effective mechanism to search for and order products and supplies online. It is offered as a service of the Defence Logistics Agency (DLA) and is often referred to as "The First Choice Support for the War fighter". It is the one-stop shopping, enterprise-wide e-Commerce site for the US Defence Logistics Agency and has 40,000 active users.

The defence E-Mall is the single entry point for all defence establishments to find and acquire off-the-shelf, finished goods items from commercial marketplace at one place. The E-Mall offers cross-store shopping for the purpose of comparison pricing and best value decision-making. To enhance security, all vendors registered on the mall meet the US Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and Defence Federal Acquisition Regulation (DFAR) requirements besides statutory requirements. The E-Mall also provides a one-stop visibility of online real time order status. The mall runs on a distributed architecture that allows the vendor to maintain the data, ensuring that it is current and accurate. This allows it to support a large number of products from multiple vendors and eliminates the need for the government to replicate data already maintained by the vendor. The E-Mall provides the benefits of reduced logistics response time and improved visibility of both government and commercial sources of supply. It is now the defence customer's first choice to search, find, compare and buy commercial and military products and services. The customer views the catalogue product information as if it was coming from a single unified source and makes an informed choice.

Managed by the Defence Logistics Agency (DLA), the E-Mall allows authorised government purchasers access to a wide variety of qualified vendors and catalogues. It is available around the clock worldwide, and offers a variety of payment options for its stores. The customer can use their Government Purchase Card or a Military Fund Code to buy any of the items from Government Stock or vendor catalogues. The E-Mall makes it easy to support a large group of people with their acquisition needs from procurement of office supplies to weapon system parts. In case any establishment has a single purchase cardholder and many personnel with purchasing needs but not the authorisation to purchase, the E-Mall can support the entire staff by registering all personnel as shoppers. All shoppers will thus have the ability to complete all their shopping, but not the ability to purchase. Staff members without purchasing power can still build a virtual cart filled with the items that they want, but instead of completing the order, these Shoppers simply send their virtual cart to the office purchase cardholder. The purchase cardholder has the ability to merge multiple shopping carts together to consolidate buys while still retaining the individual details of the orders. This way, when the order comes in, they can easily sort out who ordered what. This is thus a very convenient way to support all the needs of an entire establishment/unit. Army stations/units can also outsource routine maintenance services like garbage collection, lawn mowing and minor repairs using the E-Mall. This service has reduced average service times from two weeks to 3 days in the US Army. Customers can also track the status of their orders online thus enabling real time tracking. Besides military service personnel, Central / State governments can also order services using E-Mall.

To ensure a secure and safe gateway, DLA has over the years upgraded E-Mall's sign-on system so that DOD Common Access Cards are used to conduct transactions, thus conforming to the Payment Card Industry's set of standards for security for electronic commerce. Once the payment is approved, the stores are dispatched directly to the indenting unit by the supplier thus reducing the Customer Wait Time (CWT) i.e. the time span between the need being felt by the troops to the need being met at the “foxhole”.

Military contractors who have a Performance Based Logistics (PBL) contract or a Contractor Logistics Support (CLS) can also purchase items directly from the DLA using the  E-Mall. Due to their tremendous buying power, the E-Mall often has spare parts and components available at lower prices than the PBL/CLS contractor can find elsewhere. This is true for both Government-furnished materials and Contractor-furnished materials. PBL/CLS contractors can thus be given the authority to use the E-Mall in support of their contracts.

An E-Mall users group, designed to represent a broad customer base of E-Mall users and to meet the needs of each customer's specific mission meets quarterly to assess the E-Mall's current functionality, identify user interface concerns and any systems problems, and work on issues specific to organisations. It also proposes new functionality and provides requirements and issues related to particular customer bases. The group's membership includes representatives from all user organisations with different roles within the E-Mall -- shoppers, orderers, supervisors. The group has software that includes an issue-tracking and project-management application, which helps both the group and the E-Mall programme management team with reporting and tracking E-Mall system issues. User group members can use the software to record new issues related to functionality and add comments on existing issues. E-Mall programme managers review and prioritise issues submitted by group members, along with other proposed requirements.

The US Defence Logistics Agency by establishing the E-Mall, has provided interoperable, integrated, quality logistics data and information technology solutions that are applicable across Department of Defence, other government agencies and international partners, in order to optimise the effectiveness and efficiency of the supply chain. At present, this e-commerce site serves more than 40,000 regular military and federal users with a catalog of 65 million items with annual sales of up to $800 million. The E-Mall is therefore the one-stop shop for nearly every military item, whether for combat readiness, emergency preparedness or day to day operations for the US military forces and acts as a force multiplier in its supply chain management.

The author is a Senior Fellow at CLAWS 

Views expressed are personal.