DOD Management: Examples of Inefficient and Ineffective Business Processes
Abstract
Both of these case studies highlight significant differences between DOD's business operations and those of two benchmark companies. These differences offer stark contrasts in the efficiency and cost of doing business. With regard to our first case study, for the inventory management process related to JSLIST, stovepiped, nonintegrated systems and processes result in DOD, the military services, and the military units not knowing how many items they have and where they are located. This lack of visibility has resulted in DOD excessing and selling JSLIST while at the same time procuring hundreds of thousands of new garments annually. The lack of system integration, meaning the ability to share data across business applications, continues to force multiple manual data entry into numerous systems. These manual processes result in errors, add significant administrative cost, and generally exacerbate asset visibility problems. Although the purchase card process was somewhat automated, we identified inefficient duplication of efforts and costly manual entry of data at the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS)-Columbus which sometimes resulted in processing fees well in excess of the cost of the item purchased.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jun 25, 2002
- Accession Number
- ADA403066
Entities
People
- David R. Warren
- Gregory D. Kutz
Organizations
- United States Government Accountability Office