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Publicsector customer storyUnited States Navy

Naval Sea Systems Command improves mission readiness by optimizing asset maintenance with OpenText Content Management for Engineering

Publicsector customer story

About the US Navy

The US Navy works alongside allies and partners in defending freedom, preserving economic prosperity, and keeping the seas open and free.
Larry Atherton, chief technology officer at Ekasys, explains how his company uses OpenText software to help the US Navy maintain mission readiness
  • Active-duty personnel:
    340,000
  • Civilian personnel:
    220,000
  • Fleet:
    ~300 ships

Summary

Challenges

  • Large, complex physical assets must be built and maintained for maximum operational readiness.
  • Information silos made it difficult to efficiently monitor and service millions of components.

Solution

  • Optimized access to information.
  • Connected siloed repositories.
  • Chose the right partners for security.

Results

  • Ensured physical assets were mission-ready
  • Unlocked the ability to predict needed maintenance
  • Improved efficiency with new AI capabilities

Challenges

  • Exceptionally large and complex physical assets to maintain
  • Millions of components to monitor and service
  • Information silos made it difficult to ensure assets were operationally ready, putting crew safety at risk

As a maritime nation, the United States depends on its Navy to work alongside allies and partners in preserving economic prosperity and keeping the seas open and free. The US Navy has 340,000 active-duty personnel backed by more than 220,000 civilians and operates a fleet of nearly 300 ships and thousands of aircraft.

Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), the largest of the US Navy's five systems commands, operates four shipyards for shipbuilding, conversion, and repair, as well as ten warfare centers—including two undersea centers. NAVSEA must build and maintain ships, submarines, weapons systems, and numerous other complex and sensitive physical assets, aiming to maximize their operational readiness.

When ships and submarines come in for maintenance, it is vital to complete repairs or upgrades as rapidly as possible while assuring the highest levels of quality—like a racecar pit stop, but with ships. And with the safety of crew members and the operational readiness of military assets at stake, there is no room for compromise.

A key challenge for NAVSEA is to ensure that the supporting documentation and technical data are available to the right technicians at the right time, so that maintenance can be carried out without delay or error. Storing, organizing, and surfacing technical information about millions of components in some of the largest and most complex machines in existence represents an enormous challenge, especially when the data is spread across dozens of organizational and technological silos.

To support logistics and maintenance, NAVSEA aims to create a single standard repository for all data. In addition to enhancing maintenance operations today, the goal is to build enhanced tools for diagnostics and predictive modeling based on historical data—so that the organization can resolve potential faults before they impact mission readiness.

Tom Labatt, chief transformation officer for One Aligned, explains how his company helps the US Navy keep its personnel out of harm’s way

The capability that OpenText has brought is a true enabler for the Department of Defense, helping ensure our sailors and marines can go fight the fight and then return home safely.

Tom Labatt
Chief Transformation Officer, One Aligned

Solution

To improve mission readiness, NAVSEA uses OpenText™ Content Management to gain a unified view of information held in siloed systems and surface data and insights to the right people at the right time.

Products deployed

Optimizing access to information

NAVSEA works with two long-term partners—One Aligned and Ekasys—in records management for its Maintenance, Repair, and Operations (MRO) division. With OpenText Content Management for Engineering bridging hundreds of information silos, NAVSEA can ensure that accurate, relevant records are at engineers’ fingertips when ships and submarines come in for maintenance.

Tom Labatt, chief transformation officer at One Aligned, said: “After reviewing the people and the processes, determining the gaps and what had to be streamlined, we brought in the OpenText solution. OpenText Content Management has enabled us to optimize the processes and results without degrading any of the existing systems. The partnership with OpenText is a true enabler for the US Navy.”

Larry Atherton, chief technical officer at Ekasys, said: “If you're on a submerged submarine and something goes wrong, you need to make sure you can access the technical information to repair it, because lives are on the line. With the secure offline document storage in the OpenText solution, we can deliver that critical information even when there’s no connectivity.”

Connecting siloed repositories with AI

To extend its information management capabilities, NAVSEA is now working with One Aligned and Ekasys to deploy a pair of AI tools, OpenText Content Aviator and OpenText Knowledge Discovery. This project will enable Navy personnel to surface all kinds of information regardless of format, instantly summarize the information, and suggest next steps. The longer-term goal is to introduce predictive modeling that uses historical information to diagnose potential faults earlier.

“We’re helping the US Navy to minimize asset downtime by ensuring that the right parts are available at the right time to performance the appropriate maintenance or repairs,” said Labatt. “We're currently exploring OpenText Aviator and OpenText Knowledge Discovery as tools to be able to go into these siloed databases and extract the data.”

“[OpenText] Knowledge Discovery is one of the products I've been most excited to try because it answers the question: ‘How do we summarize and vectorize documents?’” said Atherton. “With [OpenText] Knowledge Discovery, we can teach [OpenText] Aviator how this branch of the Navy deals with their procurement contracts and what enhancements we can make. We can start making AI agents that are fine-tuned to the Navy’s data.”

Choosing the right partners for security

The strategic importance and sensitivity of information held by the US Navy cannot be overstated, so it is vital for the organization to work with trusted partners.

“Staying ahead of technological advancements without compromising security happens through key partnerships,” said Labatt. “Our partnership with OpenText is taking us from very tactical approaches within siloed databases to being able to gain a holistic perspective within a systemic approach. This is helping us to introduce the right predictive analytics across the lifecycle.”

The biggest pain point we are trying to help the DoD with is how to adopt the AI, how do we make sure it's safe, and how do we make sure it does what we want it to do. We can't have something that's 98% accurate. It's got to be 100% or it's not going to work.

Larry Atherton
Chief Technical Officer, Ekasys

Results

With OpenText AI content management solutions, the US Navy’s NAVSEA systems command has enhanced its ability to deliver the right information to engineers, helping to improve ships’ and submarines’ operational readiness.

Ensured assets were mission-ready

Maintaining mission readiness for ships, submarines, and aircraft depends on reliable, timely access to up-to-date information for engineers and maintenance crews. The OpenText AI content management solution delivered by One Aligned and Ekasys helps NAVSEA engineers ensure that they are doing the appropriate maintenance in the correct way.

“OpenText Content Management replaced a very convoluted set of information flows with the ability to make clear decisions based on accurate information,” said Labatt. “The capability that OpenText has brought is a true enabler for the Department of Defense, helping ensure our sailors and marines can go fight the fight and then return home safely.”

Unlocked the ability to predict needed maintenance

After using OpenText Content Management to unite disparate sets of data into consolidated metrics that can be trusted by maintenance teams, NAVSEA has turned its attention to improving the ability to predict maintenance requirements.

“If technology doesn't work the way it's supposed to, we could be putting sailors in harm's way, which is a terrible outcome,” said Labatt. “By using OpenText technology to develop predictive analytics as opposed to looking in the rearview mirror, we can start to work more proactively to keep assets in the optimal condition.”

Atherton explains, "The biggest pain point we are trying to help the DoD with is how to adopt the AI, how do we make sure it's safe, and how do we make sure it does what we want it to do. We can't have something that's 98% accurate. It's got to be 100% or it's not going to work."

Improved operational efficiency

The introduction of OpenText Knowledge Discovery and OpenText Content Aviator has already enabled greater efficiency and is expected to deliver further gains as NAVSEA builds new AI-powered capabilities. In the initial proof of concept for OpenText Knowledge Discovery, Ekasys was able to save almost a terabyte of storage capacity through improved de-duplication of encrypted data.

“[OpenText] Knowledge Discovery gives us a more efficient way to de-duplicate file shares, which reduces our costs significantly,” said Atherton. “We're also more secure because we don't have to have documents sitting in all these different places. And as we develop our use of [OpenText Content] Aviator, we can really scale up the impact of our human resources. If we can get ten employees using the AI, each doing the work of ten people, then we just scaled by 100: that power is incredible.”

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