FAA logistics center cooks up reinvention recipes

At the Federal Aviation Administration's logistics center in Oklahoma City, Norman C. Bowles is cooking up a reinvention storm. He's frying up a communication omelet on the stove, baking up strategic plan focaccia in the oven, stirring together some change passion sauce in the blender and letting some organizational values biscuits cool on the window sill.

As the logistics center gets its businesslike brew boiling, Bowles, director of the center, has decided not to keep his ingredients for change a secret. The logistics center staff has compiled a set of reinvention tips--along with some tasty recipes--in a cookbook called "A Taste of Reinvention: Sizzling Change Recipes from the Heartland."

The depot-like logistics center orders, stores and ships materials for 48,000 air traffic facilities around the world. But by fiscal 2000, Bowles and his 600 employees will no longer receive an annual appropriation. The center's $104 million budget will be reallocated to FAA field offices, giving the agency's line managers more control over how much money they spend on logistics support. The logistics center will have to earn the managers' business.

"This initiative forces us to become a much higher-performing organization," says Bowles. "We will be giving up our guaranteed salaries."

The logistics center's reinvention recipe also calls for a 30 percent reduction by 2001 in the average unit cost for the materials the center provides, a top customer satisfaction rating in 90 percent of the categories the center measures, 100 percent on-time delivery by the end of 1999 and zero defective shipments by the end of 1999.

If federal managers want to be in control of their organizations' future, they better put on the chef's hat, the cookbook says.

"In an era of privatization, one could conceivably say that what the logistics center does could be performed in the private sector," Bowles says. "If we're a high-performing entity, then our value to the agency increases. So we began to look at the question of what would be the future role of the logistics center. If we left that question up to other people to answer, we would be more or less pulled along. If the center were in the private sector, we would look at what's happening in the market, and then try to get ahead of where the market is."

To that end, the logistics center's cookbook calls for large servings of strategic planning, performance measurement and sound bookkeeping. Along the way, the cookbook provides recipes for dishes like frittatas, catfish fillets and yogurt.

"Reinvention organizations are like cheesecake recipes," the cookbook says. "You must take the organizations through various stages of development. When the stages are complete, you must still do a lot of blending, mixing and fine tuning. What you have at the end is something wonderful."

The cookbook can be downloaded from the FAA logistics center's Web site.