E_Procurement Internship at Defense Logistics Agency Troop Support – Summer 2015

DLA Background Information

The Defense Logistics Agency is the Department of Defense’s largest logistics combat support agency, providing worldwide logistics support in both peacetime and wartime to the military services as well as several civilian agencies and foreign countries. DLA employs about 27,000 employees. The Agency’s headquarters is at Fort Belvoir, in Northern Virginia.  DLA Troop Support is one of the many commands or divisions within DLA.

DLA Troop Support mission statement:

DLA Troop Support provides effective and efficient support to our customers and warfighters with subsistence, clothing/textiles, construction and engineer equipment, medical supply and hardware solutions in order to allow them to achieve their global missions.

My Roles within DLA

1. I checked that over 300 contracts and solicitations were published in Federal Business Opportunities (FedBizOpps), a federal web database, and recorded them in Microsoft Excel
2. I analyzed data in support of the 3rd Quarter Verification and Validation (V&V) report for Federal Procurement Data System – Next Generation (FPDS-NG), a single source web database that the public can access that shows the spending patterns of the Federal government’s procurement data. I was given by my manager several Excel spreadsheets contained lists of purchase orders.  Each spreadsheet contained data from different sources.  I compared these spreadsheets using databases within Microsoft Access in order to determine what were the unmatched records in FPDS vs the data in SAP (DLA’s enterprise business system) and vice versa for all five of our supply chains for the first, second, and third quarters of the year 2015.  Since the data came from different sources, the data in the spreadsheets had to be made compatible in order for Access to analyze them.  I needed to import the data from Excel, develop several different SQL queries within Microsoft Access which made the data uniform, and find the unmatched records within Microsoft Access.  I trained various employees how to do these SQL queries in Microsoft Access so they would be able to do it if they were ever given a similar project and saved my Access databases for other employees future use.
3. I organized procurement data errors alphabetically for each Supply Chain within Microsoft Excel, which helped streamline the process of identifying and correcting these errors.
4. I updated our buyers’ job information within eProcurement, an acquisition module of SAP, such as updating our buyers’ and contracting officers’ employment data (organization codes, location sections, and job titles), adding new employees, and deleting employees that have left or retired.
5. I created a sign-in database in Excel for tracking our buyer training sessions, to ensure attendance and to give continuous learning point credit to contracting personnel.
6. I provided support to our vendors in WAWF (Wide Area Work Flow), a post-award system, by advising DLA’s vendors how to correct errors within the documents they submitted or asking our vendors to submit the correct documents so they can get paid for the goods they delivered to us.
7. I provided WAWF support to our buyers by answering various questions they had about the WAWF system.

What I learned at DLA

I learned how to create databases using efficient SQL queries, how to work various web databases and enterprise business systems within DLA and become more comfortable with them, and I learned how to effectively communicate with my managers and coworkers so that I was giving management exceptional results and avoiding redoing someone else’s work that they have done or are doing.