New capabilities on deck for Navy's just-launched analytics platform
Connecting state and local government leaders
The Navy Data Platform is already delivering predictive analytics and will soon be incorporating prescriptive analytics.
The Navy Data Platform has been online for only two weeks, but additional functionality is already on the way.
The platform, which launched July 1 and offers self-service analytics to support data-driven decision-making for supply chain operations, is essential to managing risk, according to Cmdr. Robert Winters, executive officer for the Naval Supply Systems Command Business Systems Center.
"Data-centricity is key," Winters said at FCW's July 16 briefing on supply chain security, and the new platform is already delivering both traditional business intelligence and predictive analytics to a broad range of users.
The Navy Data Platform provides a secure hosting environment, security framework, connectivity to client software and the ability to incorporate organization-specific data, Navy officials said. The self-service aspect allows users with little knowledge of data science or statistics to leverage business intelligence to improve supply chain efficiency.
Current data warehouse and business intelligence environments, including the Navy Business Intelligence System and Information Management for the 21st Century, will be absorbed into the platform allowing it to fuse and manage financial, supply and other data from multiple sources, officials said.
"Navy Data Platform harnesses tons of data from different Navy systems, brings those massive amounts of data together, and makes it available to analyze quickly in various ways," said Tom Wirfel, data strategy lead at the Naval Supply Systems Command Business Systems Center. "It can provide reports, dashboards, and in-depth predictive analysis that can identify supply chain issues preemptively.”
The next step, Winters said, is to mix in prescriptive analytics – which use optimization and simulation to advise on possible outcomes. That addition "will get to some of those rare [but] high-impact failures that we'd like to predict in the supply chain so that we can mitigate risk."
The Naval Supply Systems Command is "currently in the down-select for the technology stack that will get us into the prescriptive analytics realm," Winters said. He declined to predict a specific timeframe for that decision, but he noted that "the fact I'm allowed to talk publicly about this" was a sign of the project's momentum.