Twelve vendors participated in an industry day last week to present systems they believe could help the U.S. Transportation Command to track shipments better.
Military and civilian members of TRANSCOM’s Joint Deployment and Distribution Enterprise considered in-transit visibility proposals from the commercial sector during the event at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, the command said Monday.
Each industry participant had the opportunity to demonstrate cargo tracking tools or methods across unit movement and deployment, sustainment and vehicle shipment scenarios within one hour.
Rear Adm. Philip Sobeck, director of strategy, policy, programs and logistics at TRANSCOM, said military services lose visibility of equipment from ports of debarkation and he believes the private sector could help the Department of Defense transform ITV capabilities.
At the industry event, a panel of experts sought multimodal transportation processes from the presenters in hopes of addressing speed, data repository and flexibility challenges associated with DOD’s current radio frequency identification network.
“The hope is that these organizations can help the JDDE develop a better ITV network that will support improved data and, in time, feed data repositories that could leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence tools for better decision making,” said Josh Hunt, a TRANSCOM logistics management specialist.