Market Research and Request for Information (RFI) For an Open Architecture

(OA) Based Maintenance and Supply Logistics Automated Information System

Statement A: Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited (27 NOVEMBER

2013)

Market Research and Request for Information (RFI)

For an Open Architecture (OA) Based Maintenance and Supply Logistics
Automated Information System
FAR Part 10 requires the Government to conduct market research before developing new
requirements documents for an acquisition. Results of market research are used to determine
whether qualified sources exist and whether commercial items or non-developmental items are
available to meet the requirement.
One of the ways the Government conducts market research is to issue a Request for Information
(RFI). This RFI provides a broad statement of need, briefly describes the Government's
intentions regarding program approach, and identifies key organizations. This RFI is subject to
the provisions of FAR 52.215-3 and is issued solely for information and planning purposes.
This RFI does not constitute a Request for Proposal (RFP) or a commitment to issue an RFP.
The Government does not intend to award a contract to pay for any information, or otherwise
reimburse responders for any costs associated with their respective submissions in response to
this RFI. Any response will be treated as information only and shall not be used as a proposal.
This RFI is issued for the purpose of understanding the range of products available for an Open
Architecture (OA) based Maintenance and Supply Logistics Automated Information System to
replace the Naval Tactical Command Support System (NTCSS). Marketing brochures or generic
company literature will not be considered. Not addressing all the requested information is
acceptable (i.e. a responder might meet many of the requirements in the Personnel section and
none in the Maintenance or Supply areas that is considered an acceptable response).
Background:
Naval Tactical Command Support System (NTCSS) provides the unit commanding officer of
ships, submarines, aviation squadrons, and intermediate maintenance (afloat and ashore)
activities the ability to manage: ship/aircraft maintenance, parts inventory, finances, tech
manuals and drawings, and personnel information. In order for NTCSS to meet future Navy and
Department of Defense (DoD) requirements, NTCSS must transition from a client-server
architecture to a modern and sustainable Open Architecture (OA). The current In-Service
NTCSS system continues to incur increased maintenance and operational risk due to
information assurance vulnerabilities with an aging baseline as well as expanding technology
gaps with modern OA based systems. Transitioning to an OA environment will allow for better
utilization of resources and improve reliability, reusability, and reduce overall total ownership
cost.
Purpose/Objective:
The mission of the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) is to ensure
Navy Information Dominance. As a major acquisition command, SPAWAR is tasked with
acquiring, installing, delivering, and maintaining advanced information technologies to the
fleet.
2

As part of SPAWAR, the NTCSS group is responsible for architecture and implementation
of key application domains including:

 Supply - material parts repair, sourcing, transportation, finances, and logistics

Naval Aviation Maintenance - parts repair, configuration management, scheduled and
unscheduled maintenance work to maintain operational readiness of Navy and
Marine Corps aircraft
Personnel - human capital management
Business Definition:
NTCSS provides a full range of standardized mission support Automated Data Processing
(ADP) hardware and software to support management of logistics information, personnel,
material management, equipment maintenance, and finances required to maintain and operate
ships, submarines, and aircraft in support of the Navy and Marine Corps.
Major components include Relational Supply (RSupply), Relational Administrative Data
Management (R-ADM), and Naval Aviation Logistics Command Management
Information System (NALCOMIS).
Relational Supply (RSupply)
RSupply provides Navy and Marine Corps personnel the tools and functions necessary to
perform their day to day business: ordering, receiving, and issuing of services and materials,
maintaining financial records; and reconciling supply, inventory, and financial records with
the shore infrastructure. The major functions of RSupply are divided into five subsystems:

Site - contains information on your own site, serial numbers, users access,
validation tables, fund codes, default values, and maintenance data.

Inventory - provides for automated procedures required to ensure that physical stock
and stock records agree; allowance lists are accurate; usage data is evaluated correctly,
and material requirements are anticipated. In addition, it provides programs the ability to
balance material requests against available funds; purge storerooms of stock no longer
applicable to supported units, to installed equipment, or in an unserviceable condition.

Logistics - provides for automated procedures to create MILSTRIP requisitions, receive

and store material, issue material to supported and non-supported customers, process
incoming and outgoing supply status, process carcass tracking inquiries and replies, and
update all logistics data files.

Financial - Provides for automated procedures for assimilating and reporting financial
credits and expenditures. Provides an automated reconciliation tool for processing of
Summary Filled Order Expenditure Difference Listings (SFOEDL) manually or through
a SMARTS file input as well as Aged Unfilled Order Listings (AUOL).

Query - Provides a real time automated means of querying data required in

decision making, providing status, and determining the posture of the onboard
spares.

Interface - Provides the interfaces required to communicate RSupply information to

Maintenance Figure of Merit (MFOM) and NALCOMIS as well as receiving data updates.
Relational Administrative Data Management (R-ADM)
R.ADM automates personnel management for the U.S. naval fleet. In addition to
providing numerous tools, utility programs, and functions, R-ADM generates
formatted reports for each function. Reports are displayed on the screen allowing
users to preview them and print them.
One of the more significant features offered in R-ADM is the capability to quickly single out a
member's record from any function and to act on or review the information for that member in
all functions to which the user has been granted access. Another equally important feature is the
capability to record the same information for multiple members simultaneously. The term
multiple means from two to the whole command.
Naval Aviation Logistics Command Management Information System (NALCOMIS)
NALCOMIS is an automated information system that provides aviation maintenance and
material management supervisors with timely and accurate information required in their dayto- day management and decision making process, while reducing the administrative burden on
the fleet, and improving the quality of upline reported data. It is a single, integrated, real-time
automated system that supports workers, supervisors and managers. NALCOMIS features an
automated source data entry device for simplifying and improving data collection, while also
furnishing a means to satisfy the Naval Aviation Maintenance Program (NAMP) requirements
contained in COMNAVAIRFORINST 4790.2B. NALCOMIS supports the configuration
management of all the data related to Organizational and Intermediate maintenance levels for
naval aviation assets; instances of system configurations are deployed with squadrons (aboard
ships as well as various shore based locations), Marine Aviation Logistics Squadron (MALS)
mobile facilities, and Fleet Readiness Centers (FRCs). It is critical that naval operations teams
have access to relevant information about the repair and maintenance history of aircraft, parts
inventory/availability, work order status, aging and lifecycle, repair resource availability, part
transportation tracking, and more.
The NALCOMIS application has three configurations:

OOMA-Optimized Organizational Maintenance Activity (supports aviation squadrons)

OIMA-Optimized Intermediate Maintenance Activity (supports FRCs & MALS)
O@I-Organizational at the Intermediate Maintenance (supports configuration
management of Auto-logset (ALS) record data moving between the squadron
and FRC/MALS)

Future State (NTCSS-OA):

NTCSS-OA must provide a flexible solution that provides logistics, maintenance, supply (to
include Food Service Management and Retail Operations Management (ships store)), and
personnel management to meet the evolutionary needs of Naval and Joint missions. NTCSSOA must be able to be customized, and flexibly altered to achieve rapid development and
deployment through efficiency gaining technology automation and optimized business
workflow to meet the needs of each line of business or functional process for which it will be
designed and

deployed. NTCSS-OA must also maintain IA compliance IAW DoDD 8500.1 & DoDI 8500.2.
The following diagram provides a conceptual architecture for how the NTCSS-OA
product components are related as a platform:

Potential Solution Architecture:

Solution architecture will account for two types of environments: deployable instances and
data center operations.
The architecture components are Java based and include:
Product
Red Hat EAP 5.1.2
Red Hat SOA-P 5.3
Red Hat BRMS 5.3
Ozone Widget Framework

Description
JBoss Enterprise Application Platform
JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform
JBoss Enterprise Business Rules Management System
Browser-based widget framework that supports
visualization and analytics.

RDBMS

Relational database management system that

support online transactional processing of data.

Operational Description:
Operating Concept - NTCSS OA provides logistics, maintenance, administrative, and supply
management (to include Food Service Management and Retail Operations Management
(ships store)) in support of Naval and Joint missions. NTCSS OA users, at various echelons

of command, are located on afloat units, at supporting ashore activities, and in forward
deployed

expeditionary units. In the afloat environment, users access NTCSS OA applications as part of
their work routine, updating functional area data on an as-required, on-demand basis, which, in
turn results in data being sent ashore to facilitate logistics data sharing with stakeholders and
external readiness and reporting systems. In addition, data is transferred between afloat and
shore sites to facilitate asset visibility and to enable distance support transactions. NTCSS OA
enables users to work in detachments and forward-deployed units with limited or no
connectivity. In these environments, NTCSS OA will continue to operate in a disconnected
mode until connectivity can be reestablished. NTCSS OA provides the same user look and feel
regardless of unit type for functions that are similar, ensuring personnel reassigned to a
different unit will be functionally capable without significant retraining. Figure 2 is the HighLevel Operational Concept Graphic (OV-1) for NTCSS OA and is provided to orient the reader
to its operational environment.

Figure 2: NTCSS OA Operational View (OV-1)

Dis-connectivity Constraint:
The nature of Naval operations and forward deployment with fixed floating real estate leads to
two inherent challenges in designing the solution: limited resources for infrastructure with
regard to power, server floor space, cooling capabilities, and hardware configurations as well as
long periods of non-communication, or limited bandwidth communication, between mobile
assets and ashore infrastructure. These infrastructure and dis-connectivity constraints heavily

influence the solution design as they necessitate a scalable, capable, low footprint, standalone,
and movable solution.

These particular constraints can present themselves across Navy assets; Aviation squadrons may
detach from one carrier to join another, or operate as an autonomous entity, requiring their
applications data to move with them. When attached as part of a larger operational group, their
data must be accessible to the larger group as well as their own operational management
resources. The application must be able to plug and play with the larger data center
environment as well as support the individual organizational unit.
Deployed instances must also be remotely updateable via a master implementation ashore
(Data Center). As development continues and new configurations are released, these packages
must be pushed out to remote instances when satellite bandwidth and/or network connectivity
permit.
Operational Scope:
End-State NTCSS OA environments:

1 Data Center deployment (supporting 611 shore-based sites*)

246 afloat platforms (Navy ships & Submarines)
12 Marine Aviation Logistics Squadrons (MALS) mobile facilities
130 Squadron detachment sites (operating stand-alone systems), but synching with
DC when connectivity is available
* The data center will also capture data feeds (synchronization) from ships/Subs, MALS,
expeditionary units, and squadron detachments when network connectivity is available

User scope:
Total user population at peak maturity is anticipated at 208,000. Broken down into 132,000
light users (logged on less than 20% of the time), and 76,000 heavy users.
Implementation and growth plan:
Year
Shore*
Afoat
Light
Heavy
Users Cumulative
Users
Users
Total 4160
1
12
4
26400
15200
2
9
0
2
12
4
26400
15200
8320
2
9
0
3
122
4
26400
15200
12480
9
0
4
12
4
26400
15200
16640
2
9
0
5
12
4
26400
15200
20800
2
9
0
Totals
61
246
132000
76000
2080
*Year 1 stand-up the data center (supporting 122 shore sites), each
follow-on year brings an additional 122 shore and 49 afoat installations.

Questions to Be Addressed:
1) Requirements Set (see attached)
Please utilize the attached requirements matrix to identify those requirements your COTS can 1)
Meet; 2) Cannot meet; and 3) Partially meet. If you answer partial, please utilize the comments
section to explain what portion of the requirement you can meet as well as when/if you intend
on meeting the full requirement in the future. Note: a responder does not have to have a product
that meets requirements in all domains a product that addresses, for example, Personnel or
Admin requirements only, is a valid response.
2) Reports Generation
Current NTCSS OA requirements state that the system shall provide the users with the ability to
generate reports (printed and on screen) on an as needed basis to obtain the current status of
supply and maintenance readiness as well as historical data queries. These reports may be
initiated against a single database, for example, located on one ship; or against the datacenter
database to get information about an entire battle group or Airwing. Additionally, users will
have the ability to create and save an adhoc query developed from a predetermined list of system
tables and fields. Please provide an overview of reporting capabilities of your product to meet
these requirements.
3) Single Sign-On
Products must integrate with existing authentication mechanisms and certificates from DoD
Common Access Cards (CAC). Please identify how your product integrates into CAC based
SSO environments; how can it leverage LDAP or Active Directory?
4) Thin Client & Browser Versions Compatibility
Users must be able to access from a web browser or other thin client; no desktop installations
will be permitted outside the development and administration teams. Please describe how your
thin client works and list which browsers and versions are compatible as user terminal software
will vary and is outside the control of any implementation.
5) Pricing
Please provide a Rough Order of Magnitude (ROM) estimate for initial investment and example
future year expenditure based on the implementation and growth plan. It is important that each
vendor provide clear explanation of when licensing models can and should shift appropriately to
be more economical for large volumes of users. Respondents will not be held to any pricing
information supplied for this RFI in any subsequent RFPs.
6) Engineering Change Proposals (ECPs)
Please provide a description of your ECP process and cost model for
changes and/or modifications to your COTS product that maybe necessary
to accommodate data exchanges (external interfaces) with the various
systems in the NTCSS environment

(e.g. Navy Enterprise Resource Planning (N-ERP), Defense Finance

Accounting Service/Standard Accounting & Reporting System (DFAS/STARS),
Supply Asset Management System (SAMS), Force Inventory Management
Analysis Reporting System (FIMARS), Navy Inventory Control Point (NAVICP),
Shipboard Warehouse Management System (SWMS), Integrated Barcode
System (IBS), Navy Training and

Management System (NTMPS), F/A-18 Automated Maintenance Environment

(FAME), Consolidated Automated Maintenance Environment for Osprey
(CAMEO), Sierra Hotel Aviation Readiness Program (SHARP), Marine-Sierra
Hotel Aviation Readiness Program (MSHARP), Training Integration
Management System (TIMS)etc).
7) Training and Technical Support
Please describe the training development and delivery options (to include
assistance in the decomposition of COTS software capabilities into job tasks
consisting of periodicity, frequency, and duration at a minimum; and
documentation provided (e.g. User Manual, System Administrator Guide
etc)) and associated costs (e.g. installation training, train-the-traineretc)
and technical support options/costs (e.g. Tier-1, Tier-2, and Tier-3).

8) Licensing Models
Please describe your licensing models (per user, per CPU/OS, per product, per feature, per role,
etc) and how they scale up. Do you offer an Enterprise License Agreement for government
programs or organizations? Are there 8A owned product resellers that can support a direct
purchase of your product? Please describe. Is there additional COTS software products required
that the government would be responsible for licensing and support, if so, describe? Or are the
additional COTS products part of the over-all bundle provided by your company, if so, how are
software updates and IA fixes provided to the government?
Response Deadline and Submissions:
Interested parties are requested to respond to requested information in this RFI with a white
paper in Microsoft Word for Office 2003-compatible format, delivered using Times Roman 12
font or larger. RFI responses are limited to 20 pages, excluding the attached requirements
matrix, cover and administrative pages. Additionally please provide the following: (a) company
name, company address, CAGE code, point of contact, e-mail address, telephone number, fax
number; and (b) business size (i.e. large, foreign, small disadvantaged, veteran owned, woman
owned, etc.).
Responses are requested no later than 30 days after RFI release. Responses shall be submitted
to SPAWAR electronically via the SPAWAR e-Commerce Central (E-CC) website.The
Government does not desire Proprietary Information, but if provided, Proprietary Information
must be clearly marked and segregated. Failure to respond to this RFI does not preclude
participation in any future competition for this requirement, nor will information provided in
response to this RFI be used to exclude anyone from responding to any future RFPs. Telephone
replies will not be accepted.

Questions
Questions regarding this announcement shall be submitted in writing via the E-CC website.
Questions shall NOT contain proprietary or classified information.

Support Contractors
PEO C4I, PMW 150 intends to use contractor support in review and evaluation of RFI responses.
Support contractors have submitted non-compete and non-disclosure letters for the NTCSS-OA
development effort. Respondents that wish to execute Proprietary Data Protection Agreements
(PDPAs) and/or Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) with PMW 150 support contractors
working this RFI must contact the Contracting Officers Representative, Julia Jimines, at
julia.jimines@navy.mil to obtain contact information for each company listed below. Any
PDPAs or NDAs must be completed prior to the submission deadline.
Reviewers: Timothy Shinn/BAH, Susan Wellersdieck/G2SS, Justine Caruso/Highbury
Defense Group, Sejal Shah/BAH, and Edwin Hernandez/Sentek.
If the company agrees with the Government support contractor review of the companys RFI
response, please provide either, 1) a copy of the PDPA executed with the Government support
contractors identified above, or 2) a statement that the respondent will allow the Government to
release proprietary data to the Government support contractors identified above.
Industry Discussions
PMW 150 representatives may choose to interact with responding vendors. Such
discussions would only be intended to get further clarification of submitted responses.
Summary
THIS IS A REQUEST FOR INFORMATION (RFI) ONLY to solicit information from industry.
The information provided in the RFI is subject to change and is not binding to the U.S.
Government. The U.S. Government has not made a commitment to procure any of the items
discussed, and release of this RFI should not be construed as such a commitment or as
authorization to incur cost for which reimbursement would be required or sought. All
submissions become U.S. Government property and will not be returned.