Logistics Performance Metrics:
 Office of the Secretary of Defense

The LRT Tool (Logistics Response Time) is a dimensional analysis web site developed for the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) as a joint effort by the Logistics Management Institute (LMI) and SmartArrays. It accesses a large database of 60 million time series, where each series is the history of processing for one requisition order.

The client wanted a tool that would let users study the history of processing orders with a specific set of attributes, then use that history to establish standards of performance.

The challenge was not only the sheer volume of information but also the type of analysis that needed to be made. The tool needed to group together time series with matching characteristics, then calculate statistical distributions on those data.

The analysts at LMI explored a number of software options – including analytic services built into database systems and the best known OLAP tools -- before settling on SmartArrays for a custom solution that performs the multidimensional analysis and distribution analysis on processing times. The result is an easy-to-use web application built with ASP.NET that uses SmartArrays to select and analyze the data on demand. The LRT Tool can let the user filter on 20 separate dimensions and spread the analysis over any combination of dimensions. A typical analysis, such as the one shown, can be produced in a few seconds.