Program Manager Oversight of Life-Cycle Support
Abstract
The commercial sector offers many examples of successful product management. Product managers integrate information across marketing, manufacturing, and logistics functional structures to coordinate workflow to align with product-oriented strategic requirements. They also use the cross-functional information to plan their market strategy to exploit new markets successfully. For example, the Procter and Gamble Company created the brand manager in the early 20th century to provide a point of contact to address product management issues. More recently, Procter and Gamble extended the product manager concept to the logistics functions under a product supply manager. Purchasing, engineering, and manufacturing responsibilities reside under a single authority who reports directly to the product brand manager. This change pushed the decision-making closer to operations to provide quicker market entry and quicker response to market threats. Because of the product manager model's success in industry, the Department will test a similar role for its program managers. Program managers will have increased visibility of operating and support costs and be able to optimize the effectiveness of their weapon systems. The new role for the program manager will influence responsive, flexible, accurate, and cost-effective focused logistics operations into the 21st century. This report documents the PMOLCS Study Group's results and presents a construct to anticipate changes in policy to promote the program manager as a critical component of the 21st century product support environment.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 1999
- Accession Number
- ADA395918
Entities
Organizations
- United States Department of Defense