The SMS Development team has been hard at work and there are a number of updates I wanted to provide to our user community. Below you'll find a quick update on our development team growth as well as the work that has taken place in both BUILDER and Enterprise SMS. The entire process is a collaborative one, from our engineers identifying requirements and issues for resolution with our customers and stakeholders, to our development team and contracted development teams and testers implementing the code solutions, to our engineers fielding the tools with our customers. It takes the entire SMS community to keep these applications and the underlying processes advancing the practice of asset management. If you see yourself in one of the categories listed above, your contributions are appreciated!

Over the past nine months, the SMS team has added three additional software developers to the team. Their addition to our team has been a marked benefit and improvement in our ability to deploy quality software tools in a timely manner. Our team is still growing (engineers/technicians across the board), so if you have interest in joining us, reach out and let us know! Read on to see the details on what the team has been up to!

BUILDER

On the heels of the BUILDER 3.5 release (3.5 Release Notes), the development team was able to make some major strides in bug-fixes with the help of one our new hires. As you will see, he has been extremely busy in his short time with us and his work will be of significant benefit to our user community. Bugs were addressed in the areas of Work Planning, Work Generation and Scenarios, Application Programming Interface (API), general aesthetics, and the BRED desktop application. Check out the full list of updates here: SMS BUILDER 3.5.3 Release Notes!

Enterprise SMS

The  Enterprise SMS has enjoyed an ever expanding list of enhancements over the course of the past fiscal year.  Major capabilities recently deployed includes a powerful application programming interface gateway to work with maps, pavement, and building data.  The application is now capable of importing and rendering legacy BUILDER and PAVER information as the first step in migrating capabilities for these SMS domains to the new platform. In addition, the first phase of business intelligence features using Microsoft PowerBI have been implemented.  Much more still to come on this front. Additional work was completed to provide system administrators a flexible configuration management utility in the web application that synchronizes with field applications to provide for greater agility in configuring and refining the application and processes as needs arise.

Hosting in a government cloud environment and managed with state of the art development tools, the Enterprise SMS is built on a leading-edge platform that is both secure and aligned with security requirements.  Investments in software testing and quality have greatly improved our ability to deploy high-quality applications with confidence. The coming year will see continued maturation of our development and testing processes through enhancements in both the tools and techniques utilized, resulting in faster development iterations from development to testing to deployment.

In August and September of this year, the Fuels community performed two field test demonstrations (at MCAS Cherry Point and NAS Patuxent River respectively) of new data collection methods - to include Functional Assessments in ESMS - and new Work Plan upgrades. The Functional Assessment questionnaire capability immediately leveraged by the Fuels community has significant flexibility in design for development/migration of other domains' Functional Assessments. The questionnaire results roll up to Functionality metrics giving analysts greater visibility into asset performance. Work Plan upgrades includes a very powerful workflow engine that allows us to support any number of custom business processes and provides notifications and tasks to users as the Work Plan matures from initial project charter to work closeout.

Stay tuned to this site for more updates as they come available!

- Matt Walters