Page 26 - Australian Defence Magazine July 2019

SUPPLY CHAIN
LOGISTICS
The ADF’s logistics system is
KATHERINE ZIESING | CANBERRA
Despite warnings from
the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) that the Military Integrated Logistics Information System (MILIS) has been increasingly unsupportable for the past five years, ADM understands that the system is to operate for up to another five years at a much higher level of risk.
MILIS is based on a piece of software called Ellipse, a purpose-built EAM and enter- prise resource planning solution built by ABB (previously Mincom). Defence has been using version 6.8 of Ellipse under JP 2077 Phase 2B. Many commercial custom- ers of Ellipse are now operating version 8 or 9, well beyond the version currently in use by Defence.
As such, ABB will no longer be sup- porting the version of Ellipse that MILIS is based on. This decision was made at a global level as the business felt it was un- able to support legacy software more than 30 years after its initial development. This move was made apparent in Australia now that the company no longer has a Defence sector lead in-country and has continually reduced the defence Ellipse development team in the past 12 months.
It is understood that one of the key driv-
ers for the ABB decision was the decision by Adobe to cease support of its Flash software in 2020. Given the use of Flash as underly- ing software within a number of legacy De- fence platforms (CAMM2, the ICT core behind aviation logistics and maintenance being the most notable example) this issue will stretch much further than just MILIS.
ABB was approached for this article but declined to provide comment on the program. ADM, however, has obtained a copy of a 2016 discussion paper that ABB released to Defence and industry partners as the department’s Chief Information Of- ficer Group sought to chart a path ahead in the wake of the news.
When an upgrade of MILIS was explored as part of the wider ERP/EIM program to keep the system running until the new Whole of Government SAP solution was in place throughout government in the early
2020s, ABB made a long list of risks that would need to be addressed.
Quoting directly from the ABB report: “At present this projects program has the last part of Ellipse 6.8 being decommissioned in the 2024/25 timeframe. ABB is currently contracted to support the current version of Ellipse 6.8 until late 2020. It is unlikely that ABB will support the current version of El- lipse beyond this date. Contractually ABB is not obliged to formally inform Defence of any decision in this regard until 2020.”
ADM understands that ABB formally notified Defence late last year that it will not supporting MILIS past 2020 for the reasons listed above.
When Defence was questioned about the future of the program that runs logistics for the ADF, Defence provided the following statement in two parts over successive days.
“MILIS will not be decommissioned at the
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