Dr. Charles “Chuck” Brandon, director for continuous process improvement at the U.S. Army’s office of business transformation, said the use of data and analytics and adoption of a collaborative approach helped reduce the service’s procurement acquisition lead time and address the backlog of approximately 14K cases at the Army Review Boards Agency, Federal News Network reported Friday.

To help the Army reduce the time it takes to procure new weapons systems, the CPI office identified unnecessary steps in the process and came up with a strategy to find opportunities for improvements by adopting a data-driven approach combined with contracting expertise.

Brandon said the move resulted in a 40 percent reduction in the PALT cycle time. “The key change has been the cooperative environment,” he added.

To eliminate the backlog at ARBA, Brandon said CPI recommended structural and workforce changes and implemented a production environment to accelerate the process of adjudicating medical advisory cases. “That backlog is now gone and it hasn’t come back,” he noted.

The U.S. Army’s G-8 collected feedback from industry and government partners and incorporated some of the lessons learned from the initial solicitation to come up with a new strategy for the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle, which is expected to replace the service’s Bradley fighting vehicles starting fiscal year 2028, the service reported Friday.

The Army decided to drop in January the solicitation for the OMFV program to review the effort’s acquisition strategy, requirements and schedule.

Army Futures Command established a set of nine characteristics – mobility, survivability, growth, lethality, logistics, weight, transportability, manning and training – as part of the adjusted requirements strategy for the OMFV program. The service plans to refine the characteristics through soldier touchpoints, digital design competitions and iterative process with industry.

“The Army believes that this adjusted requirement strategy preserves flexibility much longer into the acquisition process before necessitating significant hardware investments,” Lt. Gen. James Pasquarette, deputy chief of staff of Army G-8, said Thursday at the Future Ground Combat Vehicles virtual conference.

Pasquarette noted that the new strategy will provide warfighters an opportunity to share their insights. “Throughout this process, Soldiers will assist the Army and industry partners in refining the vehicle’s characteristics in design and forming the most feasible and acceptable set of technical requirements for final production,” he added.

He said the Army has invested approximately $4.6B in the OMFV program from fiscal year 2020 through FY 2026.

The Air Force Installation and Mission Support Center has updated an analytics suite designed to identify infrastructure and facility funding requirements for U.S. Air Force bases.

The updated Installation Health Assessment system will help commanders align funding needs for mission support areas, the Air Force said Thursday.

IHA also features over 150 dashboards that enable users to visualize and evaluate performance in various areas such as base communications, combat support and facility operations. The Air Force Chief Data Office stores the system's data and transmits them to a large database.

"Our long-term IT strategy called for automated processes that could efficiently collect, store and compute an immense amount of data from across the Air Force," said Marc Vandeveer, chief innovation officer at AFIMSC.

The center intends to deliver automated subscription-based updates to USAF and the U.S. Space Force and is working to modernize airfield management services.

The U.S. Army has provided $2.9M in funds to eight industry and academic partners to develop and implement prototypes into testbed systems under an Army Research Laboratory initiative.

The Scalable, Adaptive and Resilient Autonomy program seeks to accelerate research efforts in autonomous mobility in efforts to optimize decision-making capacities in austere environments through the usage of intelligent systems, the Army said Wednesday.

“Robotic and autonomous systems need the ability to enter into an unfamiliar area, without the ability to communicate and for which there are no maps showing terrain or structures, make sense of the environment, and perform safely and effectively at the Army’s operational tempo,” said Eric Spero, SARA program manager.

The program's initial sprint will focus on the rapid development of off-road maneuver technologies to address the Army's modernization objectives, while succeeding sprints will cover human-agent teaming as well as collaborative and heterogeneous behaviors.

The awardees are:

• Colorado School of Mines
• Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition
• General Electric
• Indiana University
• University of California, Berkeley
• University of Delaware
• University of Rochester
• University of Washington