Introduction

NATO’s Readiness Action Plan requires a transparent, cohesive and consistent training and exercise planning and management system which provides the ability to connect forces, including existing NATO nations and Partners.  NATO and nations are required to make best use of scarce resource, exploiting training synergies where possible, in order to audit, track, and visualise levels of readiness and the training risk carried by the nations and NATO.

Challenge

In order to support NATO’s High Readiness goals, increase transparency across NATO, both within NATO HQs and between allies, and to facilitate efficient collaborative planning and working, HQ Supreme Allied Commander Transformation (HQ SACT) Deputy Chief of Staff, Joint Force Trainer (DCOS JFT) required the use of an off-the-shelf software tool to support the planning and management of NATO’s Military Training and Exercise Programme (MTEP). The tool was required to deliver:

• a common interface supporting multiple views
• a high level of user configurability
• a simple export functionality to support senior level briefings

Our Solutions

Our consultants and developers have worked closely with ACT’s core user group to define, develop and implement a COTS based solution for the eMTEP requirement. This has involved detailed requirements capture, capability demonstrations and development work to customise the existing software to ACT’s requirements. User training has been provided and the data from the old eMTEP transferred across to the new system.

The Exonaut® planning and programming solutions is an agile and user friendly collaborative tool that enables authorised users to dynamically schedule exercises and related activities online through a common interface and in real time. Advanced filtering functions generate permissions based, user-definable views of, amongst others, exercises and activities, exercise, evaluation, experimentation aims and objectives, locations, participating formations and units, key resources and support staff.

Key Benefits

The ability to plan concurrently enabled by a single version of the truth with access to all the required exercise data saves staff time, enables smarter decision making, makes best use of scarce resource and realises synergies within NATO and between nations all of which has resulted in significant savings.

The transparency that the eMTEP delivers will allow NATO HQs and nations to visualise the exercise programme and to seize opportunities for collaboration.

4C Strategies’ Development Cycle, Customer Development Academies and User Fora, in addition to our very close working relationship with the client, ensures that we have early visibility of their requirements and are able to be appropriately agile in meeting them so our solutions and support remain cutting edge and relevant.

4C Strategies Group Military Director speaks about our projects with NATO and, in particular, our solution to provide NATO’s electronic Military Training Exercise Programme (eMTEP) with which NATO, Nations and Partners programme their collective training. eMTEP is an excellent example of how a COTS solution can be configured and developed quickly to meet a customer’s requirements in a cost-effective manner.