The US Navy has awarded a follow-on order to Charles River Analytics for a business intelligence visualisation system for organisational understanding, analysis and collaboration (BIVOUAC).

The BIVOUAC system provides solutions to problems faced when adopting enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems in an effort to modernise and standardise naval business operations.

“Current ERP tools simply can’t provide the type of insight we’ve demonstrated under our initial efforts, so we’re excited to begin the next phase of development and seeing what other domains we can apply BIVOUAC to.”

Charles River Scientist and technical lead for BIVOUAC Robert Stark said that although adoption of ERP systems had modernised and standardised business operations throughout the navy, the resulting increase in operational data has created a complex and challenging environment.

"To perform their jobs effectively, ERP users must integrate and manage dynamic, time sensitive information from a large number of heterogeneous sources," he said. "We are developing BIVOUAC to support the understanding and exploration of complex datasets, collaboration between ERP teams, and exploration of hidden data patterns."

Incorporating the capabilities of the company’s existing products, such as Metronome, Connect and BNet, the BIVOUAC system transmits data from multiple sources to the user.

Users can make use of visualisation displays, including network, geospatial, and a temporal to view results through reports to support communicating decisions, as well as explore hidden causal patterns in the data.

Charles River senior scientist and principal investigator for BIVOUAC Mike Farry said that the novel mixed-initiative process would enable analysts to find non-obvious and hidden patterns, even when they are distorted by time, uncertainty, and multiple linkages.

"Current ERP tools simply can’t provide the type of insight we’ve demonstrated under our initial efforts, so we’re excited to begin the next phase of development and seeing what other domains we can apply BIVOUAC to," Farry stated.