In 1924, the War Department created the Army Industrial College. Able young officers were sent to study intensively for one year. Important economists and progressive industialists taught them, then they were sent out to survey the various industries in the United States. These surveys were fed into an industrial mobilization plan, that was a scant twenty pages long, in 1940. However, the plan had detailed annexes that were published in soft cover books that were stacked four feet high. In 1940, the US Army got its budget raised in nine billion dollars, but it did not drown under this flood of dollars. This was more than all the Army budgets from 1920, up to 1939, combined. The Army had a better idea who could make what, how well, how quickly and at what price than any other government agency, business school or trade association.
In 1940 and 1941, the Army Industrial College updated its surveys and freely shared this information with private industry. A modern medium tank, like a M4 Sherman, had 4,500 parts. The prime contractor might make 1,000 of these parts themselves. It could have taken them years to track down and line up the vendors for the 3,500 parts they did not make. The Army knew who they were and connected the primary contractors to the proper sub-contractors. They found that information in that stack of annexes they had been working on, since 1924.
Sources "The Army and Economic Mobilization" by R Elberton Smith 1959
"The Business of Tanks" by G MacLeod Ross 1976