DETROIT - In the early morning hours of their five-day trip to Duluth, Minnesota, the Detroit District Logistics team were quietly loading excess equipment onto a flat-bed truck headed south.
The equipment’s destination was the UNICOR facility in Kansas, an electronics recycling center that converts electronics into recyclable materials for resale to registered vendors.
“By using UNICOR, we estimate $8,000 in savings to the district based on acquisition cost,” said Detroit District Logistics Manager Jena Graham. “Due to the area offices being spread out, it was not cost effective to consolidate their excess at one location for a typical pick-up.” A one-way trip from the District Headquarters in Detroit, Michigan to the Duluth Area Office in Minnesota is nearly a 12-hour drive.
The Detroit District covers 82,000 square miles of land and includes the state of Michigan and portions of the states of Indiana, Wisconsin and Minnesota with 3,200 miles of Great Lakes shoreline. The District is headquartered in downtown Detroit with area offices in Detroit; Duluth; Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan; and Grand Haven, Michigan.
The Detroit District Logistics team developed a ‘turn-in, pick up immediately’ process to address property surpluses across these spread-out locations which accumulated during the COVID-19 pandemic. This streamlined process already removed excess and unserviceable equipment like computers, generators and boat motors from the Grand Haven and Duluth Area Office’s earlier this summer with minimal impact to the mission.
“Our standard practice was inaccessible during COVID, so we had to adapt,” said Graham. “The Logistics team traveled to our locations that do not have a Defense Logistics Agency equipment disposition service nearby and did the heavy lifting ourselves.”
“This endeavor came with its challenges because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the Detroit District logisticians strive to be the best,” said Graham.
The Detroit District Logistics Office provides many functions and business processes for the district. They are the main point of contact for supply, transportation and facility management. These functions include tasks such as managing hand receipts, vehicles and facility maintenance.
To find out more about the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Detroit District, visit https://www.lre.usace.army.mil/.
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