The European Defence Agency

European Agency Promotes Integration of Defence Sector with Collaboration Solution.

The European Defence Agency (EDA) works to promote an integrated approach to Europe’s defence capability and collaborations in areas such as procurement, research, and technology. Shortly after it was formed in 2004, developers were able to swiftly create a range of online productivity tools. Users can access all applications through Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007, which also acts as an environment where EDA employees and defence officials from participating countries can collaborate on projects. An Electronic Bulletin Board for defence contracts is heralding significant changes to procurement by creating an internationally competitive European defence market. The overall solution provides the support the European Union needs for promoting a strong Europe-wide defence technological and industrial base.

Situation

The European defence sector has long been fragmented along national lines as a result of a traditional assumption that military matters were best pursued by governments on a country-by-country basis. However, this approach is no longer operationally realistic or economically sustainable.

The European Defence Agency (EDA) is an agency of the European Union (EU), established by the Council of Ministers in 2004 to support member states in improving European defence capabilities.

The EU High Representative, Javier Solana, is head of the agency and chairs its steering board, a decision-making body composed of defence ministers of 26 participating member states and the European Commission.

The agency’s main “shareholders” are the participating EU member states, who together are involved in more than 40 research collaborations and other working groups supported by the EDA. The agency itself employs 100 people and works with more than 2,000 people on a day-to-day basis.

An easily accessible platform streamlining processes and information is crucial to the fulfilment of the EDA mission. Moreover, the agency needed an IT solution to support internal processes, including human resources and leave management solutions, as well as facilities management applications.

For example, leave requests required filling in a paper form signed by the employee, the employee’s manager, and human resources, which would then make the required calculations.

Managing the visits of the 1,500 people who come to the agency’s headquarters in Brussels every month was also a daunting task. Visitors had to fill in a paper form and then give it to security, who would log the information in a book. The process was difficult to manage.

Solution

The EDA chose Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 to quickly establish a staff intranet and portal and then later upgraded to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The decision to implement Office SharePoint Portal Server was based on several factors, including its tight integration with other Microsoft products used by the organisation.

It initially took the two-person development team at the EDA just two months to implement and integrate SharePoint Portal Server 2003 into an overall Microsoft solution that includes Windows Server® 2003, Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005, Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, and Microsoft Dynamics™ AX.

The SharePoint technologies provide EDA staff with a single point of reference to easily and quickly share information. Alexis Letulier, Head of IT, EDA, says: “We have more than 300 collaborative sites that have been created on SharePoint. Each of them reflects a different need. Some are used to store documents, some to collaborate, and others for discussion.”

Using the Microsoft .NET Framework and Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 developer tools, together with SQL Server 2005, Letulier’s team also built the administrative tools the agency requires to run its internal operations. Each tool is accessed through the SharePoint portal, and most of them use Open XML, which allows documents to be restructured and re-used in new and dynamic ways.

The arrival of visitors and the holding of meetings in the EDA headquarters building are now automatically registered and building security are made aware of visits ahead of arrivals. When visitors arrive at the office, their meeting room is displayed on a welcome screen in the lobby.

“With Open XML, we generate the details of a meeting,” says Letulier, “and every time we need to change the presentation on the screen, we can do it without having to change the code. We just open it up with SharePoint and change the room number or the logo.”

The EDA Management Plan is also accessible through the SharePoint portal. It details all the agency’s work strands and deliverables and is updated 200 times a month. It was so successful that EDA made it available to all stakeholders. An activity database and extranet were built so that the SharePoint solution could be used to communicate outside the corporate firewall to about 2,000 additional users—primarily Ministry of Defence officials within the participating member states.

In 2005, member states agreed on a voluntary code of conduct on defence procurement, which meant defence procurement was no longer exempt from cross-border competition. After it became operational in July 2006, member states started publishing defence contract opportunities on an Electronic Bulletin Board (EBB) hosted on the EDA Web site. Since March 2007, industry-to-industry sub-contracting opportunities have also been displayed on the EBB.

Benefits

As a result of implementing Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server, the EDA is set to fulfil its mission of building a strong defence technological and industrial base. The solution is promoting strong internal and external communication, as well as simplifying administration, so employees can concentrate on strategic tasks such as expanding business opportunities on the European defence market.

Deeper Collaboration
Using Microsoft technology, EDA employees and participating members states can now access the collaboration tools they need to support the development of a strong European defence technological and industrial base.

Member states can easily and quickly look up any collaboration project to view its details, timelines, and status, as well as contributions from each participant. Paul Marshall, Research and Technology Project Manager, EDA, says: “Processing a project—from creation to completion of the contracts—can take a very long time. At each stage there can be bottlenecks, so we try to show where they are and why they’re happening. People ask us for this information on a regular basis and now we’re able to show them the entire portfolio.”

Member states have found the tools so useful that they are now also using them to seek cross-border cooperation for their own national programs. “Some member states asked if they could put their programs on it because they saw the value of our solution and realised they didn’t have anything like it in their own countries,” says Letulier.

Efficient, Automated Processes
The intranet allows EDA staff and management to spend less time on administrative tasks and helps them fulfil the agency’s mission. For example, in its first year, more than 2,000 leave requests have been completed automatically and employees were able to focus on business-oriented tasks.

It was a similar scenario with visitor management. “Now we have a tool to track who is in the building, we know the number of the badge given to them, and we know when they have left,” says Letulier.

Simple to set up and use
End users find the new applications simple and convenient to use—they are now an integral part of their daily routine. “Staff have come to take the portal for granted, like a word processor. It’s something that they depend on and use the moment they start up their computers in the morning,” Marshall says.

Technical administrators are impressed with the product—especially the ease with which they got it up and running. “SharePoint was the best tool we could find that would give us an intranet right from the start,” adds Letulier. “We just installed it within the network and it was integrated. There was no need to declare profiles or resources. From the first day it was working, people were able to collaborate and integrate their public folders.”

Competition in Defence Procurement
Up to 400 defence notices and contracts per month, worth billions of euros, are being posted on the EBB. This is heralding significant changes to defence procurement, with a traditional national activity being replaced by one of Europe-wide competition, cross-border rationalisation, and less duplication of procurement effort.

“Every procurement agency in the participating member states has a logon and password, which means they can go to the extranet to insert their contract notices, prior information notices, and contract award notices. The EDA team then accesses the intranet to validate the notices to check mistakes and ensure they meet the code of conduct criteria,” says Letulier.

For suppliers across Europe, the EBB provides opportunities to compete for contracts that previously wouldn’t have been open to them. This helps to reduce the fragmentation of European markets and encourage the creation of European defence industries that are globally competitive through greater specialisation. Perhaps most importantly, the industry-to-industry advertisements help to establish profitable new relationships up the supply chain.

“Politically, this is one of the most important tools. Most of the government contracts are multimillion euro projects that can only be won by a dozen or so major defence companies,” says Letulier. “But the EDA wanted to know what happened after the rewarding of the initial contract, so we convinced the prime contractors to publish their sub-contracts on the system. This represents a wonderful opportunity for small companies to win contracts.”