APP speeds medical supplies

The Defense Logistics Agency has awarded three contracts to General Dynamics Information Technology to help streamline and strengthen the military’s medical supply chain, the company announced in June. The contracts’ potential value is $7.4 million.

General Dynamics IT’s engineering and professional services seek to enhance procurement, catalog management and related supply chain operations to speed delivery of needed medical supplies, according to the company.

Bill Quinn, a program manager at General Dynamics IT, said the work builds on similar contracts awarded in the past decade by DLA’s Defense Medical Logistics Standard Support Wholesale Program in concert with the Defense Supply Center in Philadelphia. The program helps military medical providers deliver advanced care worldwide.

“We’re going to continue to make those systems more available, better, easier, more effective via Web-based ordering and Web-based services,” Quinn said. The three contracts deliver a suite of applications that connect commercial medical suppliers to the military, he added. Those applications include the Medical Air Bridge, which handles cross-dock shipping consolidation services that move arriving shipments onto pallets that must be sent the same day to European Command and Central Command. The application “has reduced the order-shipped time into theater ... to four days or less,” he added.

Another application, Contingency Automation, yields “quicker, more direct sourcing of requirements through the contracts,” he said. “It has tangibly assisted, for instance, the Navy hospital ships Comfort and Mercy when they need to acquire their assemblages of materiel prior to setting sail.”