E-commerce = efficiency and economy for army recruiters: e-commerce saves recruiters over 400 hours per month, boosts service.

The United States Army Recruiting Command (USAREC) recently implemented a new electronic commerce (e-commerce) system that allows United States Army recruiting offices to order items directly over the Web. Since implementing the e-commerce ordering system, the USAREC is saving well over 400 hours per month while improving customer service.

In the past, recruiting offices ordered necessary supplies by filling out paper forms and faxing or mailing them to the headquarters. Two full-time people were needed to enter orders for approximately 50 million items per year into the former accounting system for fulfillment and to track those orders against rules that control each office's ordering limits.

"Now orders flow automatically to pick tickets at the warehouse, saving the 300-plus hours previously spent in order entry and tracking credits and another 100 hours spent in generating reports," according to Dave Clapper, director of the USAREC's Logistics Support Center. "Service to recruiting offices has been improved because they know beforehand if items are in stock, can order at any time of the day, and can get the status of their order over the Web at any time."

The Command

The USAREC is responsible for recruiting quality young women and men to serve in the Regular Army and the Army Reserve. There are more than 8,000 Active and Reserve Component recruiters working out of more than 1,750 recruiting stations across the United States, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and at U.S. Army facilities in Europe and Asia.

The USAREC headquarters, located at Fort Knox, Kentucky, provides the command, control, and staff support to the recruiting force. More than 600 military and civilian personnel perform the staff activities of personnel, administration, logistics, budget, and information management, plus several specialized functions such as advertising, market research and analysis, and recruiting operations.

The "Recruiter Store" is responsible for, among other things, providing the recruiting publicity items and the personal presentation items used in the recruiting offices--items such as brochures, pencils, pens, and key chains. The store also supports the Cadet Command and the Army Reserve recruiting and retention efforts, bringing the total to more than 4,600 customers. Each customer potentially can order up to 1,500 individual items per month, for a total of some 6 million items per month.

Previous Manual Ordering Process

In the past, the USAREC mailed to each recruiting office catalogs that identified available items. This involved a considerable amount of time by headquarters personnel to produce and distribute the catalogs and at the recruiting offices to make sure they were using the current catalog and any applicable revisions. The offices had no way to know whether the items they wanted to order were in stock or exactly how many items they were authorized to order. The result was that many orders were filled only partially or not at all.

Both headquarters and recruiting office personnel had to get involved in reconciling orders to resolve problems, such as finding a suitable in-stock substitute for an unavailable item. Furthermore, overseas offices (and even West Coast offices) were at a significant disadvantage because they could get personal attention only during working hours at the headquarters.

Before the new system, the development of activity reports also produced major headaches for the headquarters staff. The two people who entered orders were also responsible for tracking the number of certain items ordered by the recruiters against the results of their recruiting efforts. These folks used a large Excel spreadsheet to enter, every month, the items ordered by each customer.

Besides being time-consuming, this manual process was error-prone and offered the potential for disagreements. The only way for one of the recruiting offices to determine available items was to call one of the two headquarters people, who typically were very busy with their other responsibilities.

Also generated manually were the reports needed to manage the entire process, such as items ordered by various offices or items in stock. That process alone consumed about 100 man-hours per month. In fact, the time required to generate the manual reports made it difficult for management to keep supply and demand for various items in balance.

Using a New Web-based System

The USAREC considered a number of alternatives to automate its ordering process. Ultimately, it selected a solution provided by A Technology Advantage (ATA) (1) of Louisville, Kentucky, a Microsoft Great Plains partner. The ATA solution used Microsoft Site Server eEnterprise business software (2) to create a Web site that enables recruiting offices to order merchandise online. Links between the site and the eEnterprise Sales Order Processing function allow users to check inventory availability, so that recruiters now can see (and order) what is in stock and make an alternate selection if their first choice is not available. Recruiters can view the available items, select items, and enter quantities that are placed in their electronic shopping carts.

Once recruiters finalize their orders, their shopping carts automatically move through the eEnterprise solution to the fulfillment module, which prints out a pick ticket in the warehouse for immediate shipment. Customers receive immediate confirmation notices with a link that they can use later to track the status of their orders.

ATA customized the system to accept a bar code number that is created once the item is packaged and is scanned by the Federal Express driver who picks up the package. Once Federal Express accepts the item, that tracking number is linked to the Federal Express shipment tracking number. Another e-mail is sent automatically when the item is shipped. That e-mail contains a link that can be used to track the item on the Web through the Federal Express PowerShip system. The order information then passes through the eEnterprise solution to create an invoice.

ATA also developed a series of custom reports within eEnterprise that provide all of the information that previously was contained in the manual reports, plus additional, useful data that in the past simply would have taken too much time to create.

Time Savings and Accuracy Improvements

"The new business system has dramatically improved the efficiency of the ordering process," said Clapper. The need to type in orders, check for the availability of inventory, track the points earned by each office, and deliver the orders to the warehouse has been eliminated. The USAREC headquarters no longer has to create and distribute catalogs, and the recruiting offices no longer need to maintain the latest versions. The new system is configured so that nontechnical people can perform day-to-day maintenance, such as adding and removing items from the catalog.

Recruiters save the time that they previously spent ordering items that weren't in stock or for which they had insufficient credits to procure. Rather than wondering if their orders were going to bounce back and would have to be redone, recruiters now know that, once an order is accepted, it will be shipped very quickly.

By the same token, orders move through the system much more quickly. In fact, a vast majority of orders now are shipped on the same day that they are submitted. Accessibility to the ordering process has been greatly improved, especially for recruiters located in overseas offices and in other distant time zones. Orders now are received at all hours of the day and night as well as on weekends. Recruiters also can much more easily track the status of their orders at any time of day or night.

Eliminating the manually generated reports saves additional time. Reports now can be produced at any time, and they are current as of the time they are produced. This permits management to keep close tabs on demand for various items. In addition, the system's business alerts function generates automatic e-mail notices to members of the purchasing staff whenever an item reaches a predetermined minimum level as determined within the Inventory Management module.

Furthermore, the accuracy of every aspect of the process has been improved. Problems that sometimes occurred in the past (such as wrong items or quantities shipped to recruiting offices) have been nearly eliminated by automating the ordering process. Errors that were inherent with manual tracking of inventory and credits earned also have been eliminated.

"The system helps us keep much closer track of the true demand for our products," Clapper concluded. "Knowing what the customer really needs makes it much easier to meet those needs."

Endnotes

(1) See http://www.atai.com/or call [phone].

(2) See http://www.greatplains.com/, call [phone], or e-mail [e-mail]/.

Mr. Dave Clapper is assigned to the Resource and Logistics Management Directorate, Headquarters, U.S. Army Recruiting Command, as a supervisory logistics management specialist. He received a B.S. degree from Northwestern Oklahoma State University and is a graduate of the AMC Logistics Leadership Center. Throughout his career as a DA civilian, he has served in varied logistics assignments and has spent several years an operations research analyst specializing in RDT&E.