18th TD verifies that the vehicles are in the correct staging area during operations then each military vehicle is sent off by serial type after they receive their convoy brief. Lightning Support stands ready to support any mission given to them.
(U.S. Army Photo by Sgt. Sarah D Williams) VIEW ORIGINAL
Emerging requirements in data processing and transmission are ever-increasing, and the Army must keep pace with current and future technologies to ensure Soldiers remain ready to “deploy, fight and win our nation’s wars.”
Integrating modernization across the Army’s existing Enterprise Business Systems has become a priority of effort throughout the Army’s strategic planning goals. Enterprise Business Systems-Convergence (EBS-C) is leading the Army’s modernization efforts, and support from the transportation community is vital to overall mission success.
Through Business Process Reengineering, the Army has aligned EBS-C reengineering of its logistics and financial processes with the Army’s Global Force Information Management initiative and with U.S. Transportation Command’s Transportation Management System to ensure integration with strategic transportation enterprise. The desired outcome of aligning these initiatives is integrated processes and data to support Army-at-Rest and Army-in-Motion decisions, deployments, redeployments, and in-theater sustainment and distribution.
As the Army increases readiness from installations to the tactical edge, the requirements and approaches supporting EBS core defense business systems must be modernized to improve business execution, data and data analytics value, and cloud computing advances while reducing ownership costs.
The business systems re-quired to support the Army’s future vision of strategic and tactical readiness are underpinned by the EBS that serves as the backbone of sustainment and financial management operations. This includes the five Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems the Army employs to man-age finances, supply, maintenance, and readiness reporting from tactical to national levels: General Fund Enterprise Business System, General Fund Enterprise Business System – Sensitive Activities, Logistics Modernization Program, Global Combat Support System-Army, and Army Enterprise Systems Integration Program Hub.
The pending end-of-service life for the Army’s current ERPs, coupled with the ongoing mission to support increasingly complex operational requirements, has provided an opportunity to converge Army EBS into a common, modernized platform that will more effectively enable Multi-Domain Operations in Large Scale Combat Operations.
EBS-C was chartered in March 2020 by the Under Secretary of the U.S. Army to begin planning for delivery of a modernized warfighting capability that enables integrated and auditable sustainment operations from the strategic support area to the tactical edge of the battlefield. EBS-C is now managed by a multi-functional capability team comprised of a group of skilled professionals from 26 different organizations, including transportation and distribution experts from Headquarters, Department of the Army; G-4, Surface Development and Distribution Command; and Theater Sustainment Commands.
Together with support from the Army Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems’ product management office, this team has conducted a high-level Business Process Reengineering of processes common in the sustainment and financial systems that transportation Soldiers and civilians use every day.
As a Multi-Functional Capabilities Team (MFCT) led by the Army’s Chief of Ordnance and governed by the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Financial Management and Comptroller, the commanding general of Army Materiel Command, and the Army’s Chief Information Officer, the EBS-C effort partners with the Transportation community and more than 400 Army-wide stakeholders across the finance, logistics, human re-sources, and acquisition communities.
Through these partnerships, EBS-C is ensuring the Army identifies an industry solution capable of con-verging current EBS platforms which specifically impact the future of the Transportation Corps.
In 2021, over an eight-month period, EBS-C BPR workshops brought together more than 400 of the Army’s best and brightest experts to assess the current state of Army operations against industry best practices and design a desired or future “to-be” state.
The BPR process may generate doctrine, organization, training, leadership, personnel, facilities, and policy (DOTMLPF-P) change recommendations. This high-level BPR set the stage for the Army to move into a BPR-supported system design effort in FY22 and FY23, which will include regular workshops focused on reimagining and improving many aspects of Army business processes, with a specific focus to drive an integrated “factory-to-foxhole” supply chain capable of enabling multi-domain operations.
The Army expects to provide several benefits to the Transportation community built into EBS-C. By aligning with USTRANSCOM’s ongoing Joint Transportation Management System BPR and integrating Army-specific equipment data, material descriptive data, financial records, and distribution planning, transportation planners from unit level to operational level will see synchronized, transparent, real-time views of what needs to move, when and where, with earlier visibility into supply and maintenance planning actions.
Transportation data management is expected to see major improvements under EBS-C. Convergence of tactical transportation planning with equipment data will provide real-time visibility of entire fleets and their readiness status at echelon and eliminate manual entry or data transfer to build Organizational Equipment Lists or Unit Deployment Lists.
EBS-C must deliver a human-centered user experience that enables performers of sustainment processes to focus on their core competencies rather than “feed the system.” EBS-C is incorporating Human Centered Design (HCD) principles, focused on simplifying the sustainment processes’ per-former’s experience by reducing the need for user interactions, simplifying workflows, and implementing intuitive hardware and software user interfaces.
“Modernization is a continuous process requiring collaboration across the entire Army,” ac-cording to the 2019 Army Modernization Strategy (AMS): Investing in the Future, which describes how the Total Army, including all Ser-vice components and Army Civilians, will transform into a multi-domain force by 2035; meet its responsibility as part of the Joint Force to provide for the defense of the United States, and retain its position as the globally dominate land power.
The Army’s modernization efforts include finding a way to field cutting-edge technology to formations to conduct multi-domain operations, bringing the Services together to test new operational concepts and digital technologies, and ensuring the Army becomes more data centric and capable of operating in contested environments to prevail on the future battlefield.
Romanian Land Forces and U.S. Army Europe designed to improve the integration of multinational combat forces. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. True Thao) VIEW ORIGINAL
In a Message from the Secretary of the Army to the Force dated February 8, 2022, Army Secretary Christine E. Wormuth states: “The work that is being done in Project Convergence to bring our sister Services together to test new operational concepts and digital technologies is the kind of innovative approach (the Army) needs to win the future fight.”
Rather than making vehicle operators into data entry specialists, BPR focused on the user experience to consider where and how all performers of processes interact within EBS-C. Equipment operators and material handlers may be passively generating data for a material solution through automated processes and hard-ware to transparently capture physical actions without operator involvement. Material solution users may be directly processing transactions. Process performers in non-transactional planning roles may be consuming and analyzing information in external ana-
lytic tools. User experience and HCD considerations will be integrated directly into BPR workshops to reshape the core processes with “People First,” not just as a software task to build a User Interface at the end.
The EBS-C motto to be “As commercial as possible, As military as necessary” drives how the MFCT and Program Executive Office-Enterprise Information System teams re-think and revise how they currently execute operations so the EBS-C effort can leverage, to the maximum extent practicable, commercial off-the-shelf solutions.
EBS-C offers a holistic view that examines how well people, policy, processes, and technologies integrate across organizations. While increasing organization efficiency, it will also provide integration of equipment and inventory material data for tactical transportation planning, development of organizational equipment lists, cube and tonnage requirements, and special handling requirements. Currently, all this data might be housed in different systems, but under one roof, EBS-C can expect to remove barriers to work and naturally integrate transactions with work processes.
This is an exciting time for EBS-C to assist the Army in its modernization efforts. In doing so, it welcomes partic-ipation from all teammates and stake-holders. Input is also needed from the Army’s operational force – across all three components, and the civilian workforce – as EBS-C continues to implement solutions and drive change.
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About the Authors:
Chris Lindstrom is the Operations Deputy Director for Enterprise Business Systems-Convergence (EBS-C) leading the reengineering of the Army’s ERP systems to converge and modernize the defense business systems operating environment to provide a modernized warfighting capability that enables integrated and auditable sustainment operations from the strategic support area to the tactical edge of the battlefield, enabling decision-making by Soldiers, the civilian workforce, and leaders at echelon. After earning a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and a master’s degree in Computer Engineering, Lindstrom started his career at National Cash Register (NCR) as an integrated circuit engineer, where he was introduced to Process Engineering and Total Quality Management (TQM). Building on a passion for reengineering and continuous improvement, Lindstrom has transformed organizations in multiple industries including government entities at the federal and state levels.
Colonel Matthew A. Price is the Executive Office for Enterprise Business Systems-Convergence, an Army program aimed at converging the Army's Defense Business Systems by 2032. An Orlando, FL native, he began his military career in April 1992 in the Army Re-serves until he received his commissioning as an Ordnance Officer from the University of Florida ROTC program. His civilian education includes a Bachelor of Science degree in Environmental Engineering (Univ. of Florida), Master's degree in Business Administrative (Saint Martin's University, Washington state), Military Arts and Science Master's Degree (School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth) and Master's in Strategic Studies from the Army War College.
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