BigBear.ai has won a nine-month, $14.8 million contract from the U.S. Army to repurpose and consolidate a group of the service branch’s preparation and training tools.
Through the sole-source contract award, BigBear will introduce the Global Force Information Management System, combining 14 legacy programs into one automated service aimed to strengthen the Army’s ability to man, equip, ready and resource, the Columbia, Maryland-based company said Thursday.
“This contract supports the continuation of BigBear.ai’s efforts to deliver on the Secretary [of the Army Christine Wormuth]’s goal of ensuring the Army embraces new technologies to become a more data-centric fighting force,” explained Ryan Legge, president of analytics at BigBear.ai.
Legge also described how the Army will now be able to make data-based, mission-critical choices regarding force structure, balance and readiness due to BigBear’s modifications and said the new system will impact Army leaders in a range of positions, “from senior leadership to combatant commanders.”
GFIM will be implemented across the service branch and gives users a window into the entire spread of its warfighters and participants and their roles. It delivers time-sensitive, of-the-moment information to a maximum of 160,000 endpoints and is designed to take into account risk in its reports.
Tasks that were previously manually entered such as unit readiness confirmation are now automated due to BigBear’s upgraded cloud architecture. GFIM additionally creates and pinpoints actionable mission data and is seen as potentially beneficial to the Deploy to Redeploy and Retrograde full lifecycle business transactions. This latter aspect is due to the system’s force administration isolated entry point.
BigBear is partnering with Palantir Technologies on this endeavor and received the contract due to the warm reception of its GFIM prototype, built during phase 1 of the initiative.
“Providing this critical combination of leading defense technology will drive a competitive advantage for the Army as it modernizes the most critical infrastructure supporting force planning and readiness,” enthused Bryant Choung, senior vice president leading federal business and defense technology at Palantir.
