The United States Marine Corps is the maritime land force service branch of the United States Department of Defense. It is responsible for conducting expeditionary and amphibious operations through combined arms, implementing its own infantry, artillery, aerial, and special operations forces.
Business problem
The Marine Corps handles vast amounts of mission-critical material and equipment, including weapons, vehicles, radios, tools, and other components and subcomponents. They rely on two critical processes: provisioning and cataloging.
Previously, these processes required six separate systems, leading to massive inefficiencies, wasted hours, and inaccurate data.
Appian solution
The Marine Corps developed the Technical Data Management (TDM)–Catalyst application to provide a single, cloud-based application. The new system integrates all the people, processes, and data involved in weapon system acquisition logistics (AL) activities, including repairing, parts provisioning, and cataloging.
Built on the Appian Platform with low-code design tools, TDM–Catalyst was one of the first Marine Corps agile development projects. The application is continuously refined based on customer input.
With the TDM–Catalyst system, the Marine Corps operates with clean, accurate, validated, and automatically updated data. By saving time on cataloging and provisioning, the AL workforce can better support warfighters by getting them the right equipment at the right time.
Benefits achieved
By automating processes, the TDM–Catalyst system:
Reduces errors, out-of-date information, and duplicate orders
Accelerates cataloging and provisioning, so the logistics team can more effectively support warfighters
Shortens national stock number validation times from 6–8 months to 24–48 hours
Enables the reassignment of dedicated cataloging personnel to more value-added activities
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