About the Client

The Acquisition Integration Directorate under the Secretary of the Air Force (SAF/AQXE) is responsible for the planning, management and analysis of the Air Force research and development, and acquisition investment budget. Each year, SAF/AQXE gathers information from sources around the globe, then prepares and submits budget justification documents including detailed descriptions of nearly $200 billion in Air Force resources to the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and Congress. The directorate then manages the execution of the appropriated budgets to ensure adherence to OSD guidelines for the timely obligation and expenditure of funds and compliance with Federal Appropriations Law.

The Challenge

Central to the client mission are several critical information systems used to track and manage funds, provide budget development and submission functionality, document congressional action, track the movement and direction of funds, and serve as the "system of record" for budget and cost reporting. SAF/AQXE required a remotely-accessible, comprehensive data analysis capability to efficiently aggregate, understand, report, and manage its portfolio of Air Force appropriations. The planning, programming, budgeting, and execution of SAF/AQXE managed appropriations requires analysis of large amounts of disparate data.  Through this analysis SAF/AQXE managers, analysts and constituent organizations should be able to accurately measure performance, and successfully align resources with requirements.  However, the data required for performing the analysis is voluminous, originating in numerous sources, and often inconsistently formatted, missing, or otherwise difficult to correlate and align.  Further, the conditioned data must be accessible to analysts via a secure, simple, and low-latency interface.

The fundamental issues associated with the data eliminate the use of a simple spreadsheet solution for data ingestion and conditioning, while the requirement for a simple to use interface eliminate the exclusive use of a highly-capable, but complicated database for all requirements.

The Solution

Segue Technologies Inc.® developed and continually improves a SQL Server-based analysis toolkit for SAF/AQXE, which comprehensively executes and validates the integration of data from numerous logistics, budget, cost, and accounting systems, into a remotely-accessible Multi-dimensional On-Line Analytical Processing (MOLAP) data cube. This information forms the basis from which budget/cost documentation packages are assembled, reports are created, and in-depth financial analysis is conducted. Through this service, SAF/AQXE logisticians and financial managers are able to gain valuable insight, perform predictive modeling of USAF programs, and provide their leadership with current and quality information in preparation for industry discussions and negotiations.