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Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division, Keyport is undergoing a major transformation in how it manages data. As part of an initiative funded by the Naval Innovative Science and Engineering program, the command is replacing a patchwork of outdated data systems and processes with a streamlined, centralized solution.
According to Karen Knewtson, the project's principal investigator and a program analyst in NUWC Division Keyport’s Corporate Business Office, the effort seeks to improve data accuracy and the efficiency of data collection across the command by creating a unified, reliable data infrastructure.
“Right now, we have all these different data sources that don't quite line up,” said Knewtson. “We have Tableau dashboards and other [business intelligence] systems across the station, but they're not all being fed from the same source. With the use of different data sources that have data aggregated based on different timeframes, the information that the visualizations provide may differ. This requires analysts to determine the source of the discrepancies.”
NUWC Division, Keyport Command Data Officer and Data Scientist Alex Barbery, who oversees the broader data management initiative that includes Knewtson’s project, added that this challenge extends beyond Keyport. According to the “2020 Department of Defense Data Strategy,” the DoD at large has long faced challenges in establishing effective data management practices and “must accelerate its progress towards becoming a data-centric organization."
“Prior to really the last 10 years or so, the DoD has not had a great way of working with data from various sources, whether it be [Enterprise Resource Planning] or any other program that we use for any number of functions,” said Barbery. “And Excel, while a great analytics tool, is a poor tool for sharing data at any larger scale.”
This can result in inaccurate, inconsistent financial data leading to misinformed decision-making and inefficient allocation of resources.
To address this problem, Knewtson’s team is developing a singular data repository that will pull data from multiple sources, including ERP, the command’s authoritative source for actual financial transactions. The new system, known as the Centralized Financial Reporting System, will leverage a suite of apps, services and connectors chosen for their ability to handle complex financial data and seamlessly integrate with existing MS systems, to analyze and visualize the data.
This approach will establish a centralized data model—what Knewtson calls a "data lake"—as a single source of truth for all financial data. It will deliver transaction-level insights through user-friendly dashboards and automated reports.
The repository will house financial data for all of NUWC Division, Keyport's service cost centers— distinct units within the organization, such as Obsolescence Management and the Acoustic Test Lab, with their own revenue, labor costs, and specialized services or products—and the overhead projects tied to each of the command’s departments.
Access to CFRS will be granted on a need-to-know basis and managed through a secure application developed by the command's Comptroller Department.
The CFRS began in 2023 when Knewtson saw the need for a centralized financial data management system at the command. This need arose from the command’s previously mentioned challenges with data quality—stemming largely from the tedious work involved in managing and manually updating spreadsheets—and with data silos, or collections of data stored and managed separately from other datasets within the organization, whose isolation prevents the command from gaining a full picture of its finances.
Knewtson’s data engineering team, which includes Data Scientists Kumiko Dunn and Matthew Bauchspies and IT Specialist Emmanuel Delgado, began its work with a deep dive into Keyport's existing financial data landscape. Initially, the team explored using application programming interfaces—digital tools that enable one software system to communicate and exchange data with another—to automatically pull data from various sources.
However, concerns over data sensitivity and strict security protocols surrounding the Navy's financial systems made this approach infeasible, noted Dunn.
“We did an initial analysis on the various different systems and found that direct access to some of these sensitive systems was generally not allowed,” said Dunn.
To overcome this challenge, the team implemented a workaround involving manually extracting data from these systems, storing it in a custom-designed, structured file system, and then importing it into the central repository. This solution, despite lacking the automation of the originally planned API-based approach, allows data to be securely transferred, organized and accessed in one central location.
To save costs, the team leveraged existing Navy resources. They used SharePoint, a widely used collaborative platform for document management and information sharing across the Navy, to house the repository, and Flank Speed, the Navy's enterprise cloud environment, as the platform through which to access it. Since these resources were already in place, the team was able to implement the solution without incurring additional costs to the command.
Knewtson worked with Barbery to secure premium space—dedicated, high-security storage and computing capacity for mission-critical data—within Flank Speed to ensure the repository could securely store and process sensitive financial data while maintaining high performance.
The team consulted numerous other Naval entities in search of an existing system comparable to the one they were developing, hoping to use it as a template, but found none.
"We did a lot of research to see if anyone else had successfully done this," said Knewtson. "Based on conversations with several different entities, we were unable to find a system that would allow for easy access of data from multiple financial data sources. So we decided to develop a system leveraging Microsoft SharePoint for data storage and sharing."
The team spent the next year designing and testing the data model; gathering and integrating years’ worth of historical data into the repository; developing a robust file system for handling data extracts; and creating user-friendly applications for inputting, interacting with and visualizing data.
Unlike previous repositories that have struggled with large datasets, the new system is built to process millions of data rows at once. This advancement is expected to greatly improve the command’s ability to manage large-scale data, minimize human error in data collection, and speed up data retrieval and analysis.
“Before, answering a question like how much was spent on a specific [command department] over the last five years could take up to an hour, with all the manual data categorizing and analysis in Excel,” said Knewtson. “Now, with the system handling millions of rows—compared to just a few hundred thousand—we can pull the data, plot it on a graph and have an answer in five minutes."
This will greatly benefit a wide range of stakeholders. The Comptroller will see more efficient workflows and more accurate financial reporting, while investment managers will benefit from streamlined investment tracking and reporting. Meanwhile, command leaders, managers, scientists, engineers and other stakeholders will have quick access to reliable raw data.
In addition to getting actionable data into the hands of decision-makers more quickly, CFRS will allow analysts to leverage their individual strengths more effectively.
“With this system, analysts will be able to focus on what they do best, and high-quality dashboards can be generated without burdening them with the time-consuming process of cleaning and preparing the data for analysis,” said Knewtson.
Beyond simply avoiding additional costs by leveraging existing resources, CFRS is expected to generate substantial savings over time.
“Using this system, analysts can instead focus these resources on more in-depth data analytics, reporting and reducing backlog,” said Dunn.
Knewtson added that the use of raw data in CFRS offers significant advantages. Users will be able to drill down into specific data categories and analyze data at the most granular level—even down to individual employees. This will provide a level of detail and insight not possible with the pre-processed data that comprises most of the data used in the command’s current reporting system.
CFRS is being rolled out in phases. Analysts have already begun using it, and their feedback has thus far been positive.
The team plans to introduce it to a wider audience in the coming months, with full production expected soon. A key goal is to achieve complete automation by the end of the next fiscal year.
-KPT-
Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division, Keyport is headquartered in the state of Washington on the Puget Sound, about 10 miles west of Seattle. To provide ready support to Fleet operational forces at all major Navy homeports in the Pacific, NUWC Division, Keyport maintains detachments in San Diego, California and Honolulu, Hawaii, and remote operating sites in Guam; Japan; Hawthorne, Nevada; and Portsmouth, Virginia. At NUWC Division, Keyport, our diverse and highly skilled team of engineers, scientists, technicians, administrative professionals and industrial craftsmen work tirelessly to develop, maintain and sustain undersea warfare superiority for the United States.
| Date Taken: | 04.02.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 04.02.2025 16:37 |
| Story ID: | 494417 |
| Location: | KEYPORT, WASHINGTON, US |
| Web Views: | 281 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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