Defense+Acquisition+Process

=Defense Acquisition Process=

The defense acquisition process guides companies through the creation of a product and ensures that all regulations and requirements set by the Department of Defense are met. Each company must make sure that they follow the defense acquisition process so that their product can be marketed. When there is an immediate need, companies attempt to get the product through faster, but the entire process still moves very slowly.

The defense acquisition process is so complex that military personnel and civilians connected to the military can train at the [|Defense Acquisition University]. This benefits people that are enforcing regulations, but it does not necessarily help companies that are trying to develop new products.

There have been many attempts at showing a company what way to follow when they are developing a new product. The following image is one of the main frameworks of the defense acquisition process. The image shows that there are different milestones that the company should pass through. The first is concept and technology development, which is considered to be under pre-systems acquisition. The next two milestones, system development and demonstration and production and deployment are part of the actual systems acquisition, and sustainment and disposal in the future are part of the sustainment and maintenance category.



New ways to simplify the defense acquisition process, including Arizona State University's [|Virtual Mentor], are being developed. According to Mustafa Demir, a graduate student at Arizona State University, the Virtual Mentor for defense acquisition was created to improve the defense acquisition process so that companies can minimize money and time spent working through the process. The Virtual Mentor shows what a company needs to do when developing a new product for the defense industry. Different phases are shown vertically and horizontally in the map created for the Virtual Mentor website. Each of the government documents corresponding to the functions in the map are available online and are linked to each phase's description. The functions in the Virtual Mentor can each be connected to two or three documents.

The Federal Government gave funding to the Arizona State University to create the Virtual Mentor, which required systems engineering and Software Engineering to create. It is meant to reduce the walls between different departments and encourage interaction between those departments. The program can continue to be developed with more funding. It could be used for small and mid-sized businesses as well as the Federal Government, and is especially meant for use in the Arizona aerospace and defense industry. The Virtual Mentor can help companies learn how to enter the market and meet the Federal Government's demands.

In the future, the defense acquisition process needs to become more streamlined and easier to work through, because it currently costs a lot of time and money to ensure that each step is completed.

[|OMT 194 Presentation]