Young Bang, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, said the service branch is establishing a digital contracting center of excellence that will serve as a hub and resource to streamline the contracting process and facilitate training of officers, Federal News Network reported Friday.
The move comes as the military branch seeks to further advance digital engineering.
Bang said that digital twins and digital engineering play a role in the Army’s digital transformation efforts.
“Digital engineering is the process throughout the whole lifecycle spanning more than just acquisition, spanning concepts, requirements, wargaming, modeling and simulations, into the material development to include everything in acquisitions, designs, testing, to the point of soldier feedback, and then going back through the whole cycle of testing and models and simulations,” Bang said at an event on Wednesday.
“So, the outcome becomes more than a paper-based way of doing things. It becomes a digital instantiation of the concepts that we can take to accelerate,” he added.
He cited the importance of upskilling and enhancing recruitment and retention initiatives and taking lessons from industry in advancing digital transformation.
Bang noted that the service is encouraging industry to pursue digital transformation by offering incentives.
Bang will serve as a keynote speaker at the ExecutiveBiz’s Army Acquisition Priorities: Balancing Readiness and Modernization Forum on Nov. 8. Register now to hear him, other Army officials and industry experts talk about the service branch’s efforts to align its acquisition and procurement processes with modernization priorities.