Monday, the Chief of Naval Personnel announced that the Manpower, Personnel, Training and Education (MPT&E) organization is going to transform its processes and IT infrastructure to enhance the Navy's ability to recruit, train and retain the force of tomorrow.

"MPT&E is a dynamic organization and must constantly evolve as an organization in order to address both current and future challenges and maintain Fleet readiness," said Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Adm. Robert Burke. "For us, that means we must be poised to quickly adapt our workforce to new and evolving threats while continuing to attract and retain the very best Sailors in a competitive talent market."

Burke said that while the Navy is able to make the personnel machine work today, it comes at a cost in terms of resources and level of effort.

"Given the amount of technological change that has occurred in recent years, coupled with a pressurized fiscal environment, we believe the time is right to modernize our personnel management processes and IT infrastructure," said Burke. "Incremental change will not be enough - we simply cannot afford to wait."

This transformation effort is a holistic effort intended to streamline personnel management processes and dramatically improve quality of service to Sailors, Fleet Commanders and the Navy as a whole. As part of this effort, the MPT&E organization will transform its current IT architecture to a modern system with cloud based aspects as well as develop an integrated pay and personnel system for Sailors.

To benchmark these systems, the Navy has leveraged several fortune 500 companies to help shape its efforts and incorporated lessons learned from the Army's on-going Integrated Pay and Personnel System development effort.

"Transforming the way MPT&E operates to streamline and optimize all of our processes will help us improve Fleet readiness, customer service to our Sailors, reduce operating costs and better manage our organizational data and programs," said Burke. "It will also allow us to effectively recruit, train, and retain the force of tomorrow as well as strengthen the Navy for the future."

MPT&E's goals with this transformation are to:
* Improve Fleet Readiness - predictive analytics will enable better Sailor fit, talent matching, improved retention, and agile responses to meet dynamic Fleet needs
* Dramatically improve the way we support Sailors and their families
* Create call centers and mobile/online self-service portals for Sailors to access their personnel information, and provide 24/7 customer service where the majority of personnel transactions can be done online or via mobile devices like many banks and companies today
* Reduce cost without loss of output via a new operating model and modern IT system
* Transform labor intensive, antiquated processes into standardized, automated ones that require less management oversight
* Provide accurate, auditable and timely personnel and pay actions
* Have a seamless data environment accessible throughout the enterprise
* Enable predictive analytics supported by Big Data

A successful MPTE Transformation effort will result in significantly improved business processes and integrated personnel, learning, recruiting, pay, financial management, and data systems.

Once complete, Sailors will be able to upload documents such as marriage and birth certificates to their personnel files, have award and performance records in one place, see where their orders are in the release process, and have 24/7 customer service support through call centers and mobile applications. This effort will also help provide real time data to the Navy, which will help inform bonus-decisions, and potentially help the service move toward tailored compensation for Sailors.

The Navy plans to conduct a field test of its integrated pay and personnel system later this year at Recruit Training Command for approximately 1,000 recruits. The test will run in parallel with the Navy's current personnel systems, which will provide a non-disruptive, side-by-side, comparison of personnel and pay transactions. While actual data will be employed in this parallel test, all actual pay and personnel actions will continue to be processed via current systems. Officer and Reserve elements will not be included in this first test.

Additionally, to help improve customer service and Fleet readiness, the Navy intends to internally reorganize MPT&E's command structure later this year.

The Manpower, Personnel, Training and Education (MPT&E) enterprise is responsible for manning the Fleet and making sure that our Sailors are ready for the litany of jobs and tasks they will be asked to undertake in the Navy. This responsibility includes finding and recruiting talented individuals to serve, executing training pipelines that take young Sailors through their initial education and beyond, and ensuring that our ships, squadrons, and submarines are fully manned.

For more news from Chief of Naval Personnel, visit http://www.navy.mil/.