National Forging Tooling Database Earns Achievement Award

The National Forging Tooling Database has been named one of eight winners of the Diminishing Manufacturing Sources and Material Shortages (DMSMS) 2009 Achievement Award. The award is sponsored by the U.S. Dept. of Defense’s Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), and was developed by the Defense Standardization Program Office to recognize efforts to mitigate DMSMS issues. This year, DoD’s DMSMS Working Group Award Panel received 20 nominations from the Department and industry groups. The NFTC was established in 2004 by the Defense Logistics Agency, the Forging Industry Assn., and several commercial and research organizations, to help supply chain managers locate forging dies. It contains 280,000 National Stock Numbers or part numbers, estimated to be worth $5 billion in forging dies. The production of many U.S. weapons systems and their critical components depend on forgings and forging dies. Without these dies, weapons systems may not be able to source forgings readily, which adversely impacts national defense readiness and mission capability. There are also significant sourcing and manufacturing cost savings as a result of the database. “Although work-around solutions are possible exploiting existing forging tooling is the best solution for supplying these critical parts to the warfighter,” according to NFTD. “The value of the National Forging Tooling Database is its widespread distribution and ability to rapidly locate forging dies to produce critical parts for Department of Defense weapons systems,” it says.