USAF A1M MPES Redevelopment

About the Client

The A1M organization is the official Manpower office for the United States Air Force. It oversees multiple applications and interfaces of the Manpower Programming and Execution System (MPES) including the Unit Manpower Document (UMD) and the Future Years Defense Plan (FYDP) applications. MPES allows the Air Force to determine what skills are required for a position, create change requests to adjust staffing levels at MAJCOMs, Wings, and Units around the world, identify deployable assets, assess current air and ground strength, build requests for additional manpower resources, and perform manpower reductions. They are the official systems of record regarding all US Air Force manpower actions, for the Air Force leadership, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the President, and Congress.

The Challenge

The legacy MPES system used by A1M was purchased from the US Army and had been developed to support vastly different requirements. They were operating on an Army mainframe system with shared resources and limited operational support using an IBM DB2 database and ColdFusion. The hardware resources provided sluggish performance and unacceptable downtimes during peak business hours due to system unavailability. Because of the design history, they did not fully support Air Force manpower requirements. In fact, users often needed to massage and manipulate their Air Force data to fit the Army manpower system-designed functionality. As their data and programming needs became more nuanced and individualized, the gaps between the system and the customer’s business processes became more pronounced. Consequently, users were expending a large number of man-hours reworking, tracking, and double-checking data to ensure it was correct. An Air Force review and analysis concluded that the MPES system hardware and software did not support emerging and anticipated future Air Force Manpower requirements.

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The Solution

Segue Technologies worked directly with A1M and their users to completely redesign MPES from the ground up. We began documenting the requirements for their existing data and workflow. Then we modeled the expected usage of the system to determine necessary hardware performance. This allowed us to design a new and efficient SQL Server database for their specific data needs, featuring a normalized data structure, and a reliable archiving system with a complete offsite backup capability, something the previous system failed to do. To accompany the database, we built a new ColdFusion Web application that is tailored to their business processes and streamlines the required steps and tasks of the legacy system. In redesigning the architecture, hardware and software Segue provided a total business solution and support to the business and operations of A1M on the classified (SIPRnet) and unclassified (NIPRnet) networks. In total the hardware footprint was increased from ten servers to over forty and the redesigned systems provided A1M more efficient and robust applications to meet the future needs of the Air Force.