An Engineered Assessment System to Manage Demand Reduction Initiatives

Abstract

The Joint Warfighting Concept is a framework for how the United States will fight in the future security landscape. To successfully carry out these new concepts, the military services must find ways to lessen the logistics burden at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels. Only by reducing the demands on its current and planned sustainment systems can the United States continue to be a dominant force on the world stage. However, defense agencies such as the Logistics Functional Capability Board lack a quantitative, credible, repeatable process to effectively assess and manage demand reduction initiatives. This paper is based on work from a student/faculty team that created an assessment system for demand reduction initiatives. Discussion highlights the systems engineering techniques that were used in the effort, which includes but is not limited to stakeholder analysis, functional analysis, morphological analysis, and value modeling. The blended qualitative and quantitative methods focused on user and stakeholder needs to create a process system to evaluate technologically disparate, multicriteria systems. The team expects that the resultant assessments system’s applicability to a range of demand reduction initiatives would be of interest to organizations that must prioritize technology proposals, as well as perform trade-off analysis. Additionally, the approach to create the assessment system has the flexibility to adapt to changes in the stakeholders’ requirements from the reduction initiatives, as well as the ongoing evolution of the warfighting concepts.