FORT LEE, Va. (April 15, 2010) -- Fort Lee will experience a 30 percent increase in population as it consolidates the Fort Eustis Transportation School, Ordnance Mechanical Maintenance from Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., and the Ordnance Munitions and Electronics Maintenance Schools from Redstone Arsenal, Ala., with its existing training centers to form the U.S. Army's Sustainment Center of Excellence.

To assist in planning this transformation and managing the demands of the installation's expanded population after consolidation is complete; the post is implementing SERP, an innovative software solution package created by HNTB Federal. This scheduling, modeling and decision-support software can access and manage the necessary data to schedule Fort Lee's 10,000 daily activities and coordinate up to 1.25 million assets, dramatically simplifying time-consuming processes that previously required the coordination of more than 10 different systems.

The immediate access to volumes of data gives Fort Lee leaders the information they need to accurate answer pivotal BRAC planning and scheduling questions, such as:

Aca,!Ac When will new training facilities be ready'

Aca,!Ac In what order are they needed'

Aca,!Ac Will planned traffic modifications be able to support the additional population'

Aca,!Ac How will the additional training requirements impact our training facilities'

"The BRAC commission's recommendations are changing Fort Lee's operating environment by adding more than 10,000 Soldiers to our existing footprint," said Col. Shelley Richardson, Army Logistics University president. "It will be essential for us to have the ability to quickly place critical information into the hands of planners who can act on it. SERP allows us to be very smart and efficient in this new environment."

With the ground-breaking scheduling, modeling and decision-support tool named BASE4D, planning, scheduling and accomplishing components, base leaders can establish a common operating picture of the base at any point in time to determine needs and allocate resources. Fort Lee leaders can retrieve information from a central system rather than collecting data from more than 10 different installation and Army-wide systems used to track resources, facilities and requirements. By streamlining information into a single tool, the application gives planning staff a new way to quickly access and view critical information.

"We can make accurate decisions up to five years in advance, to best accommodate our Soldiers," said Kevin Blimline, government project manager at Fort Lee.

The ability to analyze military installations across four dimensions is the basis of SERP. The program facilitates the management and assessment of a large number of variables across time and space.

Applied to a training example, users might input the number of students, classrooms and buses needed to carry out a specific training exercise, and then indicate the timeframe: the present, short-term future (up to one year) or long-term future (one to five years). SERP can then schedule these activities and resources accordingly.

"With SERP, the best time to image laptops will be known, the best time to transfer personnel, the traffic patterns clogging the front gate; and the availability of training equipment," Blimline said.

Training on the new decision-support software system has already begun on Fort Lee. Project coordinators are using a recent merge involving 21,000 University of Virginia graduate and undergraduate students and 37,000 University of Maryland members as an example of the system's capability.

"Fort Lee faces (similar challenges) as it continues to meet the mandated changes outlined by the 2005 BRAC commission," they said.

For more information, visit www.hntb.com.