Cataloging the DoD Washington DC

How does the Department of Defense keep track of the millions and millions of items in its inventory? One answer is 2D data matrix barcodes. It's all detailed in the Department of Defense (DoD) Guide to Uniquely Identifying Items: Assuring Valuation, Accountability and Control of Government Property.

The challenge is laid out in fairly straight-forward language: "The Government Accountability Office (GAO) and other auditors have repeatedly found that the federal government lacks complete and reliable information for reported inventory and other property and equipment, and can not determine that all assets are reported, verify the existence of inventory, or substantiate the amount of reported inventory and property…Further, the lack of reliable information impairs the government's ability to (1) know the quantity, location, condition, and value of assets it owns, (2) safeguard its assets from physical deterioration, theft, loss, or mismanagement, (3) prevent unnecessary storage and maintenance costs or purchase of assets already on hand, and (4) determine the full costs of government programs that use these assets."

In times of war, it's even more important, the DoD says. According to the Joint Total Asset Visibility Strategic Plan, January 1999, "In every troop deployment this century, DoD has been plagued by a major difficulty—the inability to see assets as they flow into a theater and are in storage. This situation has led to direct and significant degradation in operational readiness. When assets in the pipeline are not visible, they are difficult to manage. Property is lost, customers submit duplicate requisitions, superfluous materiel chokes the transportation system, and the cycle continues. Assets at the retail level that are not visible and, therefore, not available for redistribution, further compound the degradation of operational readiness."

The key to making this system work is the Unique Identification (UID) standard. "UID is item-level tracking of certain classes of equipment in the DoD inventory or delivered to DoD by vendors," explains Kyle O'Brien, UID Product Manager of Siemens Energy & Automation in Nashua, N.H. "It's almost like a Social Security number on these items." Siemens latest UID verification product is its UID Compliance Verifier.

The DoD policy is that "all relevant business, warfighter, intelligence, and enterprise information environment mission area transactions, among the Department of Defense, Federal and State Agencies, non-governmental organizations, and domestic and foreign persons and organizations will use UI standards for discrete entities."

That means that all property, plant and equipment with a unit acquisition cost of $5,000 or more, and items that are sensitive or classified, or furnished to third parties, regardless of acquisition cost, must be marked suitably for audit.

Most items are marked with Direct Part Marketing (DPM) barcodes. As Department of Defense vendors moved to comply with the standard (MIL-STD-130) they found that label technology was unable to meet permanency requirements, so they switched to DPM techniques, including lasers, electro-chemical etch and dot peen technologies. Several updates and revisions of MIL-STD-130 have come out (it's up to revision N) since the UID mandate in 2004 to improve the standard for verification. To evaluate the marks, which use different substrate materials and methods, the Association of Automatic Identification and Mobility (AIM) created its DPM Quality Guideline (DPM-1-2006), most of which was adopted by the DoD in MIL-STD-130M, Change 1.

There also is Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS), which is a specific provision in the contracts that requires the defense contractor to implement the MIL-STD standard.

"You have to verify the matrix image and be sure it's readable in the future," says O'Brien. "You don't want a contractor delivering parts that are not readable by government resources."

The Siemens product is significant because it is the first verification system to include all 10 illumination configurations set out in MIL-STD-130N (previous versions only had nine configurations; Version N added dome lighting). The dome lighting configuration is ideal for cylindrical objects, such as gun barrels.

Of course, the system goes beyond just lighting; there are sophisticated imaging algorithms involved. The system itself is a smart camera (Siemens HawkEye) with fixed optics. "In an earlier run of the product there was a camera, three lenses and three lights," O'Brien says. "It was more of an engineering task to get it set up, focused and captured. Now it's a simple unit with one-button operation. It cycles through all 10 illumination types, captures images and grades them. It's an exact science that lends itself to verification."

The system automatically cycles through each illumination option, then reports the results to the user, identifying the best overall illumination setting for the marking technology and part surface of each application. Specific results also may be output as data fields to most SQL capable commercial data base products.

There is a critical need and a long way to go. Through December 2007, O'Brien says, there were about 2 million items in the UID Registry. There are as many as 400 million items still unregistered, including current inventory.