These opening lines of the Army Data Plan of 2022 are comprehensive. Army operations must adhere to this guidance within all operations. The rapid transformation of data into information, which reduces decision time and risk, is essential for sustainment in large-scale combat operations.
The U.S. Army Combined Arms Support Command (CASCOM) Sustainment Center of Excellence (SCoE), in its role as the force modernization proponent for sustainment, is leveraging the sunsetting of the Commander’s Actionable Readiness Dashboard (C@RD) to develop a single enterprise-wide analytics tool connected to authoritative data sources. Today, over 100,000 Soldiers and civilians rely on C@RD for their data visualization needs. C@RD connects near-real-time to the Global Combat Support System-Army (GCSS-Army) and provides dashboards for equipment and operational readiness, and fleet and repair part management. However, as an early adopted technology, C@RD is significantly limited in data processing speed and volume. With a heavy focus on maintenance, C@RD cannot view all sustainment operations, including medical materiel, personnel, and training readiness.
The CASCOM commander directed the Enterprise System Directorate (ESD) to look beyond a C@RD replacement, for a solution providing next-generation capabilities and cost effectiveness using best-of-breed solutions. Capabilities of different tools were assessed, and complexities and learning curves were identified. ESD focused on finding the right software and architecture strategy to overcome the known shortcomings of C@RD while keeping pace with emerging technology, ensuring the software was easy to understand by even novice users.
From the beginning, Microsoft Power Business Intelligence (BI) emerged as the most viable solution. Its ability to ingest data from a variety of sources and easily create and present visualizations has made it a preferred tool throughout the Army. Included in the Microsoft A365 software package, Power BI is available to all Army users with an A365 license. Seamless integration with other Microsoft products makes it intuitive and easy to use. Sustainment Soldiers and Civilians already count among the millions of Power BI users as they seek to manage data across their commands. Advanced data visualization and BI capabilities provide real-time insights, artificial intelligence (AI), and predictive capabilities through Microsoft Copilot.
Once the command settled on the software, the real work began. ESD worked with the U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Command Software Engineering Center’s Army Shared Services Center (Army-SSC) at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, and Microsoft to develop an initial proof of concept, connecting Power BI in real-time to the GCSS-Army database. The proof of concept validated the selection of Power BI and demonstrated the capabilities and efforts required to reach full operational capability.
Understanding the Army Data Plan SO 2 guidance, “Decreased Time to Field Software and Decision Analytics to Outpace Any Adversary,” MG Donahue gave ESD 12 months to complete the first two phases of the plan. Phase I began in October 2024 and will conclude in April 2025 with the conversion of all existing C@RD dashboards to Power BI. In the following six months, Phase II will convert approximately 100 GCSS-Army BI reports. Phase III will integrate more advanced capabilities and features. These include cloud data staging, which will enable integration of additional authoritative data sources and AI integration for data modeling, which in turn will enable more rapid analytics development. In March 2025, CASCOM pushed the first four dashboards out to the force: Equipment Readiness, Fleet Management, Class IX Repair Parts, and My Materiel Tracker.
As Phase I quickly gains speed, three key advantages have emerged. Each supports multiple strategic objectives of the Army Data Plan:
Increase the velocity of the decision cycle in all environments and echelons through faster calculations and visualizations (Army Data Plan SO 1). As a comparison, C@RD’s equipment status report (ESR) for a brigade-sized unit rendered in 14 seconds. The new Power BI ESR renders in less than one second. Drilling down to level-two detail reports is nearly instantaneous, whereas C@RD struggles with this task, taking between 20 seconds to four minutes. Cloud data staging (Army Data Plan SO 7) will further enhance performance and accessibility during disconnected operations (Army Data Plan SO 6). Preliminary tests also reveal that the new Power BI solution can handle 10 times more data than we presently have in GCSS-Army. This makes it an ideal future-ready solution that will easily accommodate the next-generation enterprise resource planning that will replace GCSS-Army.
Cost avoidance is achieved by leveraging existing Microsoft licensing (Army Data Plan SO 5), reducing development time and labor because Power BI is easier to develop and sustain. Further cost avoidance has been achieved by using the existing C@RD data models and formatted data. The Army spent nearly $60 million on C@RD dashboards and key process indicators, including filters and input controls. The Power BI-based approach surpasses current performance at a fraction of the cost.
Introduction of AI to assist in the creation of new data models (Army Data Plan SO 2) further reduces cost and development time. AI is key to offering refined user search options and help features but must be done in conjunction with the Artificial Intelligence Integration Center (AI2C) to remain nested with Army efforts and to ensure the Army’s ownership over the solution.
A scalable solution through cloud data staging will provide a high-level understanding of operational and strategic combat power by integrating additional authoritative data, such as personnel availability, casualty reporting (Integrated Personnel and Pay System-Army), and training readiness (Digital Training Management System) (Army Data Plan SO 8).
CASCOM/SCoE leans in on fulfilling the need described in the first lines of the Army Data Plan: use data to put the right sustainment capability at the right place, at the right time. This is supported by a single enterprise-wide analytics system connected to authoritative data sources. The current development path maximizes the value of existing resources and maintains control over the Army’s intellectual property associated with data and data rights. Integration of an intuitive software familiar to our community reduces the number of disparate efforts from units across the Army, saving resources and improving data accuracy. As sustainment enterprise analytics modernization continues, early integration of AI in dashboard development is a focus to facilitate predictive capabilities going forward. Involving AI2C becomes imperative to sustain and refine these AI models long term to suit the needs of the Army and tailor it for our use cases. It leverages AI2C to write predictive algorithms for the sustainment community.
CASCOM is not in this alone. ESD builds an ever-growing coalition across the Army: Department of the Army G-4, Army Enterprise Systems Integration Program Hub, Army-SSC, Enterprise Business System Convergence Multi-Functional Capabilities Team, and Army Materiel Command, in addition to AI2C. We appreciate their continued support.
The points of contact for this project are MAJ Apoorv Vohra (apoorv.vohra.mil@army.mil) and Mr. Jay Rieger (jay.rieger.civ@army.mil).
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MG Michelle K. Donahue serves as the commander of the U.S. Army Combined Arms Support Command/Sustainment Center of Excellence at Fort Gregg-Adams, Virginia. She has served as a sustainment brigade commander, support squadron commander, battalion executive officer, battalion support operations officer, battalion S-4, battalion S-2/S-3, and battalion and brigade S-1. She has also served as the 56th Quartermaster General and Commandant of the U.S. Army Quartermaster School at the Sustainment Center of Excellence; Deputy Director for Readiness, Strategy and Operations for the Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff/G-4; and Special Assistant to the Director, Army Staff for the 2023 Army Transition Team. A Distinguished Military Graduate, she received her commission in the Quartermaster Corps from Duke University in 1996. She also holds advanced degrees from Georgetown University and the National Defense University.
MAJ Apoorv Vohra is the project lead and is an analytics subject matter expert. He assumed duties as the data scientist and technical architect at U.S. Army Combined Arms Support Command in January 2024. He entered the Army as a major under the direct commission program. He holds a Master of Business Administration with a concentration in finance and has an SAP Global Certification in finance & controlling. He has 16 years of experience as a data scientist and data engineer. He worked as a vice president in technology operations at Morgan Stanley, IBM, and Accenture.
Jay Rieger serves as the branch chief at U.S. Army Combined Arms Support Command Enterprise Systems Directorate, heading the sustainment enterprise analysis modernization effort. He is a retired colonel who served 33 years in the Army as an air defense artillery and quartermaster officer. He has been a senior program manager in Army training information system software development and in the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System for operational contract support. He authored the Information Systems - Integrated Capabilities Document for Predictive Logistics while working as a capability developer.
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This article was published in the spring 2025 issue of Army Sustainment.
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