Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 6, 1993 TAG: 9303060181
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: MADELYN ROSENBERG STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
TECH EXPERT ENSURES MILITARY IS WELL SUPPLIED
WHO'D EVER THINK toilet paper was important to logistics? Such a detail matters to submarine crews - and to Professor Tom Mentzer.
Tom Mentzer studies details - the little, behind-the-scenes details that make things run.
He looks at military uniforms and whether they get to the troops on time.
He looks at toilet paper and whether there's enough of it - about three months' worth - stocked on a nuclear submarine before it goes underwater.
And he looks at the agency that provides these things: the Defense Logistics Agency.
Mentzer, a professor in Virginia Tech's marketing department, is a logistics specialist.
He recently received a $159,000 grant from the logistics agency to study how well it does its job and how well it satisfies its customers, which can range from the grunts at a military base to the starving in Somalia.
"The DLA was chaotic six months ago," Mentzer said. "They were recovering from Desert Storm when they had to help with the hurricane relief effort. When the president says, `Get this food to the people of Florida,' it's the DLA's job to get it there."
The department used to have more of a military focus, Mentzer said, when the military's job was to keep a watch over communism to keep it from spreading.
But since the cold war has ended, the agency is more of a "quick reaction force," he said.
It's more like a corporation, and Mentzer, who has studied logistics for corporations, is spending the next year looking for weak spots.
"You can send all of the troops you want to Somalia," Mentzer said. "But if you can't get food delivered, they'll still starve."
His job is making sure the agency serves its customers well. To make sure pens and pencils - and other devices - are getting to the CIA, syringes to the hospitals. That means making sure women in the armed forces get uniforms that fit in all of the right places - a trouble spot identified by a female officer several weeks ago.
"They want to learn to do things faster," Mentzer said. "And with less money."
Each month, Mentzer gets a 5-inch stack of tables and charts to sift through and study. He meets with focus groups of the agency's consumers.
He searches for logistical problems.
"Logistics are working if you get the right product at the right time at the right place in the right condition," said Mentzer, sitting behind an orderly desk that he calls messy.
Next month, he will survey 30,000 people in the armed services, asking them to identify the things they deem important.
"One thing I've learned is that with different products, there are different concerns," he said.
For example, when medication is needed, the major concern is time - the product is needed as soon as possible.
With uniforms, their condition is often the main concern.
And the agency deals with a lot of uniforms: 250,000 every six months.
It deals with 3 million different products and $8 billion a year in fuel alone.
"Nothing in the military runs without fuel," Mentzer said.
The grant will last him a year, and that will be enough time to identify the problems.
But he is hoping for more grants, to go another four years, he said.
Because once he identifies those problems, he wants to help solve them.