2019 Government Innovation Awards
Keeping Navy manpower at the ready
The Navy’s Total Force Manpower Management System helps track the hundreds of thousands of Navy personnel stationed around the world and provides the data processing power necessary to prepare those individuals for their missions. The TFMMS modernization effort has enabled leaders to manage their current and future manpower requirements more efficiently and quickly.
It was a massive undertaking. TFMMS encompasses over 760,000 billets and 9,500 organizational activities, and the legacy system was a hodgepodge of document repositories, manual processes and custom applications that hindered enterprise collaboration and compliance. A team of Navy personnel and contractors, coordinated by Navy Project Manager Gregory St. Julien, overhauled TFMMS from top to bottom, moving from a mainframe to a three-tier service-oriented architecture and mixing commercial, open-source and custom government software to deliver an easily adaptable system that pulls all manpower business processes, policies and documents into one enterprise system.
TFMMS is the Navy’s first system to combine classified manpower data and redacted unclassified data in real time. It uses a Defense Information Systems Agency cross-domain enterprise solution to deliver constant, global access — a notable improvement over the previous once-a-day schedule for data transfers.
St. Julien praised his colleagues and the many TFMMS stakeholders for driving change at such a scale. He added that progress in 2019 far exceeded his expectations and has changed others’ beliefs about what’s possible. As a result, still more enhancements are likely in 2020.
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