Battle Creek hosts AMR team

Defense Logistics Agency Disposition Services personnel hosted an agency headquarters team in Battle Creek, Michigan, August 26-29 for an Agency Management Review to formally evaluate the major sub-command's compliance with laws, regulations and DLA policy and procedures.

"The [AMR] provides an objective analysis to help management identify areas of vulnerability and improve overall program performance and operations through corrective action plans," said Sam Labara, a management and program analyst in the MSC's Business Support Process Health division who helped coordinate the effort.

The AMR effort is spearheaded by DLA Logistics Operations and kicked off around 2017. During every MSC visit, an entrance conference serves to lay out the team's expectations at the start of the evaluation period. Team members have a checklist of business processes to examine, and they produce a daily report. At the conclusion of the evaluation period, the team hosts an exit conference where they share preliminary findings. Eventually, the team will issue an assessment rating and the MSC has a month after release of the final AMR report to address findings.

"The program offers ways to isolate trends, identify best practices, and strengthen performance across the agency," Labara said. "These reviews augment and integrate with Agency A-123 and Enterprise Risk Management initiatives for operational control testing and deficiency monitoring, providing more coverage with less impact on field personnel to perform testing and reporting."

DLA Disposition Services Director Mike Cannon compared the focus of what an AMR team does at a MSC headquarters to what the MSC itself does during field site evaluations and said he'd like to explore the prospect of getting some of the team's process experts to take part in those reviews.

Labara said that the most recent DLA Disposition Services AMR took place in mid-2021, and this time, assessors will return to their home station to finalize their findings and submit a report that he expects to come out in November.