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Navy Version of Expedia Could Save DoD Millions
Nerval's Lobster writes "The U.S. Navy expects to save $20 million per year on its global logistics and transportation budget, thanks to technology that has been saving business travelers billions since 1996. The Navy is testing a system that consolidates information about freight and personnel travel schedules into a single database—the better to give individual decision-makers a choice of the quickest, cheapest options available using 'an Expedia-like' search capability, according to the Office of Naval Research, which developed the application. All that being said, the Transportation Exploitation Tool (TET) is a little more sophisticated than online-travel sites such as Expedia or Travelocity were in 1996: The system consolidates travel schedules and capacity reports for both military and civilian carriers to give logistics planners a choice of open spaces in ships, planes, trucks, trains or other means of travel, along with information about cost, estimated time of arrival and recommendations of the most efficient route. Previously, logistics planners trying to get an engine part to a Navy ship stranded in a foreign port, for example, might spend hours or days looking through separate databases to find a ship or plane able to carry the part that could deliver it within a limited window of time. 'This system is truly revolutionary,' Bob Smith, program manager at the Office of Naval Research (ONR), wrote in a statement announcing the system. 'TET uses advances in technology to provide outstanding optimization of available flights and ship routes, saving our logisticians enormous amounts of time—and that can literally mean saving lives.'"
Has no-one heard of C.H. Robinson? That's what they do... minus the military cargo/personel flights, etc...
Will they save more if they purchase a hotel and rental car along with delivering the munitions ?
Nullius in verba
I'm sorry, but you can't just go back and replace the entire experiment in terror that is the Defense Travel System. You all made your beds, now lie in them. /disgruntledexgovie
Until someone finds out how to get the military schedules off this site.
The picture at the top of the article is a USAF KC-10 Extender cargo aircraft. Is the Navy going to include all the USAF airlift capacity in TET?
Have a Day!
Not really. I think this is a really good idea.
Have gnu, will travel.
"'This system is truly revolutionary,' Bob Smith, program manager at the Office of Naval Research (ONR), wrote"
"Revolutionary". I don't think that word means what they think it means considering "thanks to technology that has been saving business travelers billions since 1996"
Seems like it would be evolutionary at best.
Airfares are a strange market, selling a particular segmented product, and trying to maximize the profit on it. Logistics optimization when you own the network, on the other hand, is a different, and well-studied problem. The closest analogy is probably to shipping: someone like Maersk has pretty good software optimizing their shipping routes and determining which containers should go on which ships, and which ships should take which routes to which ports.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Exploitation? wouldn't Transportation Integration Tool be better? TIT?
So the Navy licensed the Walmart logistics software then?
full of Tom Cruise clones. Then you will be sorry.
A frequent flier program, just wait they will use the system to figure out to create FF mileage runs.
I am the TIT commander goddamn it! I have all the power.
I have to invade Iran because my boss is making me. But our fleet really wants to occupy North Korea this summer.
Thanks to TET, we saved enough money we were able to plan both invasions, and ended up with a slight surplus. Thanks TET!
It's 2013 and we're still having trouble with the traveling salesman^w warlord problem?
... because I missed the "revolutionary" aspect of "putting all your data into one database." Or is it based on context? Maybe logistics and capacity handling are "revolutionary" to the Navy; meanwhile, FedEx and UPS are saying "Welcome to ten years ago!"
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
As a current user of such great Navy cost savings initiatives such as Navy ERP (SAP), Defense Travel Service (DTS), and Navy/Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) I remain skeptical that actual cost savings will occur. As so many of you in industry can attest, a lot of these cost savings initiative result in nice shiny Powerpoint slides for the brass, a pile of money to the contractor/consultant, a ton of pain at the working level, and little or no actual savings.
In the case of the military, "lean" supply chains are not always a good thing. Sounds great in peacetime, but in war I would much rather have extra spare parts gathering dust in a warehouse a few hours away in Diego Garcia or someplace like that rather than efficiently floating around waiting for the "just in time" order.
I can't believe they don't do this already.
"to give individual decision-makers a choice of the quickest, cheapest options available" This seems to happen every few years.
Passionately Indifferent
ONR does not build or buy things for the Navy, ONR is an R&D funding agency which prototypes things it hopes the Navy will use. It's a civilian office with civilian metrics (publish papers in scientific journals and put out press releases). Sometimes you get very good people (or programs) there that manage to get things tested on ships.
SPAWAR is the Navy sub-agency that manages and purchases all the software for the Navy. When they're talking about this, it will happen.
This isn't a good system, but it's the one Congress has put in place.
20 million big ones
thats like $20,000,000.00
I bet it would take a whole day just to vacuum that much from the couch cushions at the Penatgon!
Ok the Expedia / etc comparison was stupid to bring into the comparison as there is very little comparison unless you consider people freight. But this is kind of awesome. They have developed a JIT freight system that is potentially accessible to the individual shipper that helps make for more efficient shipping. I wonder how much they borrowed from the private shippers like UPS and FedEx. But hey they have access to much more refined data about global shipments so I would guess they make the big boys of private enterprise look like rank amateurs in shipping analytics, mostly because they look at it from a far more encompassing point of view. And if this system is making the Navy money outside of our taxes then I am all for it, especially because it is a globally beneficial system. Bonus points for the fact that the major benefit is non-violent.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Welcome to the military, folks: where our tech is either 20 years in the future or 20 years in the past.
Hopefully this can scale to include the other branches....I'd hate to think of all the duplicate systems amongst all 4 services.
These words ending in "-illion" all sound too much alike. Let's try scientific notation. TFA says TET will save 2x10^7 dollars. The Navy budget is approximately 1.6x10^11 dollars.
So this savings is, roughly, 0.01% of the Navy budget. It's like a developer who makes $100K/year saving 10 bucks over the year. It's worth doing, but I wouldn't call it a windfall.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.