Summary
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) is failing to meet its performance targets for goods delivery to the UK’s largest military operation in Afghanistan, as reported in 'The Use of Information to Manage the Logistics Supply Chain: Ministry of Defence’ (HC 827).
Despite an overall reduction in time taken to ship supplies to troops in Afghanistan, there is significant room for improvement as only 54% of shipments made were received in time of their target.
Operation HERRICK in Afghanistan is currently the MoD’s main operational commitment, constituting the majority of the Department’s supply chain activities. It is the main case study discussed in the National Audit Office’s (NAO) report.
Highest priority items sent by air should arrive in theatre within five days: however, in 2010, this was achieved in only around a third of cases. Failure to deliver the right items on time is primarily due to items being unavailable for transport. This means that either the MoD is not accurately forecasting usage and repair rates; or suppliers are unable to respond to demand.
Moreover, the MoD is unable to reconcile coherently the information it does possess on the location of its assets and its inventory and supply chain costs. One consequence of this lack of information is that more material than necessary is being sent by air, including many items which have predictable demand.
While surface routes are not suitable for all types of equipment and can carry greater security risks, at least 90% of total transport costs to Afghanistan comes from air deliveries - transferring just 10% of items sent by air to Afghanistan to surface delivery routes would save an estimated £15 million per year.
The MoD has developed a blueprint intended to improve disaster recovery capability, stock level visibility and increase the speed of defence management report distribution.
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