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Advanced Analytics and Artificial Intelligence for Defence Enterprise Resource Planning

Advanced Analytics and Artificial Intelligence for Defence Enterprise Resource Planning

NATO nations are increasingly relying on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to integrate and manage core business processes associated with finance, human resources, materiel, infrastructure, maintenance, procurement, sustainment, performance reporting, and other key business processes. These ERP systems rely on shared databases that typically contain huge amounts of real-time data and historical transaction data. Although ERP systems often include business intelligence (BI) tools used by staff officers in support of day-to-day business activities, the output of BI is generally static and often leaves much data underexploited.

Advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) can be leveraged to exploit this data much more effectively. They can provide much more value to planners and decision makers than BI by helping them to forecast what will happen (predictive analytics) and recommend courses of actions (prescriptive analytics). Furthermore, advanced analytics models can be deployed within ERP systems to be used on a recurring basis by planners and decision makers. Because these new capabilities are still in the early stages of delivering analytics, they must carefully select use cases that can generate most value quickly, in order to minimize the risk of low returns on investments, slow results, and loss of support from senior leaders.

NATO STO’s Research Specialist Team (SAS-150) started a one-year project to develop a method for enabling defense organizations to easily prioritize and characterize use cases based on their feasibility and potential benefits. This framework will be tested and used to prioritize a set of use cases identified by the Specialist Team in a workshop setting. The work will be directly exploitable by Chief Information Officers (CIOs), Chief Data Officers (CDOs), as well as by S&T and analytical branches of defense departments across the Alliance.

The team, led by Canada, had its first face-to-face meeting at the NATO STO Collaboration Support Office facilities in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. Participating in the meeting were experts from Havelsan Turkey, Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO), United States Combat Capabilities and Development Command Data and Analysis Center (CCDC DAC), Roketsan A.S Turkey, and Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC).

This research activity is supervised by the System Analysis and Studies (SAS) Panel - NATO STO’s expert analytical advice panel. The SAS Panel develops and oversees studies, analysis and information exchange activities that explore how operational capability can best be provided and enhanced through the exploitation of new technologies, new forms of organization or new concepts of operation.

Please contact the SAS Panel Executive if you want more information on the research.

NATO STO’s Specialist team on Advanced Analytics and Artificial Intelligence for Defence Enterprise Resource Planning

Published by SAS