Prescriptive analytics planned for Navy Data Platform

The Navy Data Platform has been live for barely two weeks, but additional functionality is already on the way.

Cmdr. Robert Winters, executive officer for the Naval Supply Systems Command Business Systems Center, said the platform, which launched July 1 and offers self-service analytics to support data-driven decision-making by those who manage the Navy's vast supply chain, is essential to managing risk. "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 next step, he said, is to bring prescriptive analytics into the mix -- an addition "that 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 downselect 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 noted that "the fact I'm allowed to talk publicly about this" was a sign of the project's momentum.