Author: rjb
DoD Communities of Interest: C4I
Subject: Business Automation
Due Date: 22 May 2020
Government Organization: DIU
Description: The Department of Defense (DoD) workforce consistently spends millions of labor hours, manually tracking and resolving discrepancies in enterprise resource management systems. In order to eliminate many mundane and tedious business processes, the DoD leverages robotic process automation (RPA) tools on rules-based tasks. Current automated workflows are strictly conditional, requiring well-defined business logic and processes prior to implementation. However, many more processes have less-defined business processes, which require manual intervention to fix.
DIU seeks readily available, commercially viable automated machine learning (ML) solutions to enhance DoD’s existing RPA tools, enabling them to automatically identify, predict, and recommend corrections to complex business processes. Anticipated discrepancy types include resolving unmatched transactions; identifying patterns of fraud, waste, and abuse; and other inaccuracies or redundancies in financial, logistics, travel, and payroll accounting systems.
Desired Product Capabilities:
The solution must be capable of providing an ML platform and vendor-supported integration (working with DoD IT specialists) with existing RPA. The ML platform will identify and suggest corrections to business processes that are not limited to previously well-defined business logic methods. The solution must integrate with existing automated workflows and be cloud and RPA agnostic.
- This is not a call for an RPA tool or cloud service provider (CSP).
- Any and all models must be extensible, interpretable, explainable, and/or auditable.
- The solution must simplify data flow patterns (push/pull for streaming and batch), sharing, and exposure through defined standards using common message protocols (e.g. REST APIs).
- The solution should use open standards where possible (modular, open systems architecture).
- The vendor will be working closely with a government team of domain experts, developers, and system administrators and engineers on model development and integration.
- The vendor should be able to provide data integration support to include: Extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) of data from raw sources to a structured datastore and integration of model outputs into the larger RPA pipeline.
Note:
- Data leveraged may be stored within queryable datastores, on shared drive(s) accessible via common protocols, or directly pulled from systems as static files and be structured and/or unstructured.
- Data volume and frequency depend on individual automation use cases.
- Vendors selected at phase one will be invited to deliver a technical pitch and live product demonstration (virtually via telecon) within two to three weeks of the closing of this posting. The demonstration portion of the pitch will allow the evaluation team to assess the current maturity of the proposed solution, utilizing data to be supplied by the Government in advance. The Government will not provide funding for company participation in the pitch/demonstration.
- Vendors selected at phase three for a prototype agreement award will be required to support a discovery workshop within three weeks of agreement award.
Eligibility Requirements
- Prospective companies must be US-owned to be considered.
Website: https://www.diu.mil/work-with-us/submit-solution/PROJ01259.
Questions or assistance, contact:
North Carolina Defense Technology Transition Office (DEFTECH)
Dennis Lewis
703-217-3127
Bob Burton
910-824-9609
