Charles River Analytics, a developer of intelligent systems solutions, received a follow-on contract from the US Navy for a Business Intelligence Visualization System for Organizational Understanding, Analysis, and Collaboration (BIVOUAC). This system addresses the challenges encountered in adopting Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to modernize and standardize Naval business operations.
“Although the adoption of ERP systems has modernized and standardized business operations throughout the Navy, the resulting increase in operational data has created a complex and challenging environment,” said Mr. Robert Stark, Scientist at Charles River and Technical Lead for BIVOUAC. “To perform their jobs effectively, ERP users must integrate and manage dynamic, time sensitive information from a large number of heterogeneous sources. We are developing BIVOUAC to support the understanding and exploration of complex datasets, collaboration between ERP teams, and exploration of hidden data patterns.”
BIVOUAC imports data from multiple sources, which users can then explore through user-friendly visualization displays, including network, geospatial, and temporal. An Interactive Data Miner allows users to view hidden data, such as causal effects. Users can then view visualization results through reports to support communicating decisions. “This novel mixed-initiative process enables 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,” said Mr. Mike Farry, Senior Scientist at Charles River and Principal Investigator for BIVOUAC.
BIVOUAC incorporates the capabilities of several of Charles River’s products. Metronome™ provides the GUI framework so users can customize data visualizations to support their workflow. Connect™ powers the data model and visualization of the data. BNet® supports exploration of hidden causal patterns in the data.
This material is based upon work supported by the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific under Contract No. N66001-12-C-5202. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific.
