Amazon.mil

DSCP has been doing business online through Warfighter.net and its predecessor, the Automated System for Cataloging and Ordering Textiles, for more than six years. In the process, it has changed the way the military goes to the mall, racking up more than $140 million in sales last year.

"We manage the requisitioning of many different items, including dress coats, trousers, skirts, outerwear, personal armor, chemical protective suits and special purpose clothing like ecclesiasti-cal dress [for chaplains] through Warfighter.net," says Jeanette Lacovara, supervisory business systems specialist for the Web site. "We also manage items like mattresses, sleeping bags, insignia and rescue products." Warfighter.net's customers include supply clerks as well as soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines stationed all over the world.

DSCP sold more than $1 billion in clothing and textiles last year. Ninety percent of the orders came through the normal requisitioning process; Warfighter.net handled the rest. Just as e-business applications have revolutionized parts of the private sector, Warfighter.net has helped transform a business function vital to DSCP's overall success at meeting the military's supply needs.

Getting Online

In 1995, when programmers in the DSCP's Clothing and Textiles Direc-torate (C&T) first started to consider providing product information online, they wanted to build an electronic bulletin board, says Paul Rosso, DSCP business applications specialist. At the time, private sector firms and government agencies were just beginning to take advantage of the possibilities of the Web as a business tool.

"When the Web started to come on, we decided to go with a Web-based catalog," Rosso says. "And as things progressed we decided we wanted the system to be able to accept orders, to accept credit cards and also provide order status."

Once C&T decided to move into the e-business world, its strategy fell quickly into place. By the end of 1995, the directorate had posted its initial catalog and had begun taking orders over the Web. "We were the first ones on the Web in the whole center," Rosso says.

The conventional wisdom in the government technology world says agencies should use commercial off-the-shelf products whenever possible to minimize potential problems with development, implementation, cost and specialized maintenance. Yet when C&T came up with its idea, the DSCP staff had no commercial e-business options to choose from. "One hundred percent of the development was done in-house," Rosso says. "The thing was, there wasn't [an off-the-shelf] package out there that could do what we wanted it to. Now there are, but back then there weren't. If one was available we would have gone for it." C&T officials estimate they have spent a total of $100,000 on software and hardware and another $60,000 in development by in-house programmers since they decided to take their business online. The system C&T put in place is a Web front end for a mainframe-based supply cataloging and requisitioning system. "The site is really a front door to our legacy system," says Mike McFadden, a C&T business applications specialist. "Still, we hide all of that complexity and eliminate some confusion."

The online site gave C&T customers another channel for receiving service, an essential element of successful electronic government. The system helps DSCP offer customers a vast array of products. "We have an estimated 12,000 generic items in the online catalog. But we might have 15 sizes in a shirt. This means we may have 32,000 to 33,000 items in the catalog total," Lacovara says.

And because the requisitioning clerks who use the site enter all of their information over the Web, the system eliminates data entry on C&T's side. "The Web site speeds up the process," Lacovara says. "Warfighter.net takes the orders and gets them right into our legacy system. If the order comes in by fax, someone has to key it in here."

Spreading the Word

"When I first saw the site I felt it was very user-friendly," says Chief Warrant Officer Jeffrey Brehmer, director of the Warrant Officer Advanced Course at the Quarter-master Center and School at Fort Lee near Petersburg, Va. "At the same time I thought, 'Where were you 10 years ago when I was in the field?'" Brehmer takes an insider's view of just how useful Warfighter.net can be for supply clerks. He says the site solves some age-old requisitioning problems faced by field commanders. He remembers, for example, ordering a certain kind of command post tent that had many components that were frequently lost, forgotten or broken. Before Warfighter.net, replacing the parts was difficult because no publication listed them all. Plus, ordering replacements involved dealing directly with the manufacturer. "Back then we hardly had computers," Brehmer says. "We just didn't have that resource available. And when all of a sudden a component broke, like a pole, I had no way of actually researching that pole to replace it. I had to call the manufacturer, and they took care of it. If I had had the Warfighter.net site back then, I could have gone in and actually found the specific tent components broken down in a list online. It's a very big asset."

Now, when a supply clerk needs a part, he or she can go online, find the product and its component list, see a digital image, determine its price and get a C&T contact for more information. Buyers can purchase entire products, such as tents, or simply buy replacement parts.

"Plus, you get stuff a lot quicker than before," Brehmer says. "Sometimes it used to take 10 to 15 days before an order was even processed. Warfighter.net expedites the process." Brehmer looks forward to the day when individual soldiers, and not just supply clerks, will be able to use the system to order such products as physical training gear online. Warfighter.net now has 3,000 registered users, about one in five of its possible customers throughout the services. Lacovara and her team have been out selling Warfighter.net, acting as online supply evangelists. There is no disputing their success. Sales have grown from nearly $850,000 in 1997 to more than $141 million in 2000, an increase of nearly 600 percent. From 1999 to 2000, Warfighter.net's sales rose by $91.3 million. The Warfighter site began accepting government purchase card orders in 1998. That year, the site took in $200,626 in card sales. By 2000, purchase card sales had shot up to almost $1.8 million.

New Features

The Warfighter.net team steadily has debuted more and more new products. As a result, shopping on Warfighter.net rivals the Amazon.com experience. For example, when a supply clerk makes a requisition online, he or she gets an e-mail confirmation that includes a hyperlink to a page showing the status of the order.

Users also can fill virtual shopping baskets, then choose to buy or shelve any items in their baskets. "We've been adding more and more features," says McFadden. "But it's still a work in progress."

The site also has been fleshed out with mini-catalogs-pages designed for specific buying groups or to showcase particular kinds of items. For example, the center has won kudos for a store specializing in religious items.

Customers "don't want to have to go through and search for where their items are, so we've tailored the site so that people . . . don't have to search through the entire catalog for what they need," Lacovara says. "It helps them pick the right items. We try to make things as simple and easy as we can."

"One of the benefits of Warfighter.net is that every item can be pulled up on the screen," says George Allen, DSCP's deputy commander. That's no mean feat given the size of the community DSCP serves. "We have to have enough business agreements to clothe 500,000 people," says Allen.

DSCP has hit its share of bumps on the road to building Warfighter.net. Last year, the Army, the site's largest customer with almost $60 million in requisitions annually, accused DSCP of double-billing on purchase card orders. It turned out the Army was mistakenly recording the orders in two separate accounting systems. Ac- cording to DSCP, the Army is correcting its records.

The Warfighter.net team is already looking to the future. It hopes to shift soon to a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) system to power its online catalog and storefront operation. The goal is to launch a new Web site sometime in the first half of 2001. At that point, "we are probably going to begin accepting personal credit cards," Lacovara says.

As the Warfighter.net team evaluates options, they are hoping to select an e-business solution that can be used by other directorates within DSCP as well, Lacovara says. "We are looking to see if we can find a COTS solution that will satisfy a lot of the commodities and not just one."