U.S. foreign military sales (FMS) program offices manage the procurement of defense supplies and services on behalf of foreign customers. The United States oversees thousands of transactions for dozens of products across more than 70 countries.

These transactions interact with the end-to-end approach for a given weapon platform or combat system to ensure the product enables an FMS customer to deploy, operate and maintain the platform or system for its entire service life. With many moving parts, the process from acquisition to sustainment has the potential to take years, even if all steps go smoothly.

Challenge

Our client is a major program office that oversees FMS across the entire Navy, managing case development. Case dependent challenges and complexities create an environment ripe for schedule delays and frustration.

The case development process consisted of multi-phase and manual processes to initiate and manage tasks across multiple organizations and locations. Routine actions like generating reports and drafting memos, documents and case taskings were done manually, creating a slow and inconsistent communication stream among stakeholders.

The creation of these artifacts required dozens of man hours with a high margin for error due to the revisions, rerouting and lack of visibility into a process dozens of milestones too long. The inevitable result was schedule approval delays and inaccurate metrics tracking and reporting.

Previous process improvement attempts were stalled because of strict compliance and security requirements for new solutions and tools. These requirements, along with price and manpower constrains, limited available solutions.

Action

Partnering with our client, CSA assessed and analyzed existing DoD platforms with varying capabilities and costs. The National Security Agency’s (NSA) Intelshare platform is free to users and was already being used in the program office.

Our FMS experts partnered with CSA JARGON, our internal innovation lab, to tailor existing workflows in Intelshare to automate portions of the FMS case development process. The end solution was the Case Development Automation Tool (CDAT) that provides a central collaborative location.

The tool uses custom process automation logic that standardizes user input, dynamically guides stakeholder actions, captures relevant metadata, auto-generates consistent email communications and documentation, and enhances oversight through real-time, dynamic dashboards.

The solution is simple, cost effective, quick to develop and provides users with the agility to make updates as policy and continuous improvement dictates.

56

Offices

10

Organizations

300+

Users

Results

CDAT is currently used by more than 300 users across 56 program offices in 10 organizations. When policies change, the CDAT process automation logic can quickly be updated to ensure compliance. As a result, CDAT improves the quality and speed of the Navy FMS case development process by effectively reducing common errors, removing multiple manual steps and providing stakeholders with in-process guidance and insight.

CDAT provides automatic metric generation in both Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint all while allowing flexibility for outlier and manual processing when needed. This tool provides senior leadership with better insight into the case development process. Metrics include total turnaround time, time in case development, number of reviews and topic areas identified for improvement.