The U.S. Navy, an RPA Pioneer

The U.S. Navy Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC) manages the $6 billion facility contract process for the Navy. This includes contract bid, negotiation, document writing, cost accounting and award in support of facility projects and construction. In addition, NAVFAC manages another $2 billion of facility maintenance efforts. This spending is related to all aspects of real estate, design, construction, Navy housing, base operations, base development and environmental efforts. As with any organization that has used computing throughout the years, NAVFAC has a mix of systems running on different computing platforms.

Managing the end-to-end contract process for the Navy is significant. In addition to the sheer volume ($6 billion), there are about 2,000 people executing 64,000 contract actions, which total about 6.4 million mostly manual steps. The Navy’s goal, like many commercial organizations, was to reduce process time and cost to accomplish its mission and rely more on speed and agility.