The Air Force A3 operations directorate is rolling out the air resource tool enterprise mission information system, or ARTEMIS, a new platform set to replace its outdated aviation resource management system.

“It’s done. And by the way, it was built in 180 days. We took the next 180 days to fix all the things that we encountered when we smoke-tested it out in the field. We took another 180 days to get it healthy, which is now encountering a user acceptance testing phase, so we’re going to be rolling that out,” George Forbes, the director of the Air Force digital operations directorate, said at the AFCEA NOVA Air Force IT day on Dec. 13.

The service relies on its aviation resource management system, or ARMS, to track training, medical compliance and flight hours for over 68,000 aviators — it manages every aviation system in the Air Force. The last major system update, however, was back in the 1990s.

Complementing ARTEMIS is Apollo, which is a suite of tools designed to integrate aviation resources with operational functions such as scheduling systems, standardization evaluations, and grade books —  those elements are the “heart and soul of operations and flying operations,” said Forbes.

“For me, that’s our singular focus for the next few months as we roll these products out in a very rapid fashion,” said Forbes.

In addition, Forbes said one of the key priorities for A3 is leveraging the vast amounts of data these tools generate.

“This this past week, we’ve had our Air Crew Summit, which is a convergence of all the four stars. As I talked to the several of the commanders, one of them in particular mentioned that he no longer wants to have any PowerPoint presentations. It’s all data-driven. Another command has achieved that,” said Forbes.

“We’re going to continue to reduce the toil and shift our resources and automate them so that our analysts have more time for cognitive tasks and reduce a lot of the manual tasks.”

All five wings of the Air Force Special Operations Command, for example, rely on a centralized data fabric for reporting and managing operational information, which now saves the command approximately 11,000 hours a year.

“We work with the data that the [Air Force manpower, personnel, and services directorate] provides on our main systems. We transfer that into our supply and demand curves for our aircrews — how many do we need and how many do we have. And that process would normally take us eight to ten weeks. We’re now doing it at one,” said Forbes.

And the shift to data-driven workflows has also changed how the Air Force handles combatant commanders’ requests for forces.

“The process by which we would respond to our combatant commander’s request for forces normally is about an eight or ten-week process with the chance to ask one level of questions without having to repeat that whole process and starting over. Eight weeks after you get the request, the information is stale. We’ve now shortened that to about two hours,” said Forbes.

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