Logistics Maturity Evaluator

To operate effectively, federal civil agencies should continuously develop new, more integrated logistics systems to acquire, maintain, and deliver needed equipment, materials, and infrastructures that are optimized in terms of investment and benefits. Agency managers generally recognize that existing logistics systems are not as effective or efficient as they could be; however, there is no available benchmark to readily assess current systems without significant investment. The challenge is to reduce the costs of operations and support, increase workforce productivity, reduce costs of managing inventory, and increase the effectiveness of delivering support material and services. To achieve these objectives, the logistics systems of each agency should be evaluated to determine how well operations are being supported, whether meaningful improvement initiatives are planned or in place, and what the end cost will be. LMI wishes to help government logistics managers determine the current state of their logistics processes, prioritize resource application, and identify future direction. To do so, we embarked on a research effort to develop a logistics maturity evaluator (LME). By accomplishing this independent research and development task, we hope to develop LMI's analytical capability to provide a structured high- level assessment of federal agencies logistics status, progress, and proficiency and help agency managers target areas for improving performance and reducing support costs. The LME borrows heavily from the capability maturity model concept being applied in many organizations to meet management's need for an unbiased assessment tool. Our intention is to develop a repeatable system that gives logistics managers an objective comparison of the present status of their agencies business processes and technologies for delivering goods and services. We completed the first of two phases for this research task.