ILIAS INTEGRATED APPLICATIONS SUITE
By Harold Brouwers, ILIAS
Short intro on ILIAS Solutions’ history and references:
In the early 90’s, the Belgian Air Force had a requirement for significant improvements in aircraft availability and at the same time for reducing support costs. Hence ILIAS as a product was co-developed and finally put into production in 1997 to support their F-16 fleet. Shortly after our solution software was put in production by the Air Force, the Navy had also noticed the benefits and adopted the system in 1998.
At present, ILIAS successfully manages the MRO and Logistics of the entire Belgian Defence organisation (BeDef) and this for all its military components being land, sea, air and medical.
Around the same time, our product ILIAS was also chosen by the NATO E3A, main operating base for AWACS, as the best available COTS solution on the market to replace the legacy systems and to manage the data of all procurement, supply and maintenance processes. Better known as PILS (Programme Integrated Logistics System), our system is operational at NATO Geilenkirchen, Germany.
In 2006, Fuerza Aerea de Chile procured our ILIAS solution for their F-16 Weapon System Management. It took only 18 months to implement all functionalities such as the setup of the physical server infrastructure, the migration of legacy data, the configuration of the software suite, the training, … in two operating bases and HQ. The Chilean Air Force is seriously looking at the possibility to roll out ILIAS to its other aircraft systems.
Today, ILIAS Solutions (ISC) is an independent and privately held company, located in Brussels, facing NATO HQ. Short chain of command and decision cycles allow us to be extremely agile and able to deliver, whilst committed to quality and reliability.
Short intro on ILIAS:
The Integrated Logistics Information and Automation System (ILIAS) is a software application, which was specifically designed to cover requirements of defence organisations in the domains of Operations, Configuration, Maintenance, Inventory and Purchasing. Hence any type of equipment can be supported, from commodities to complex defence equipment.
Over the past years, the application has been built and matured to specifications of the defence and the homeland security organisations in our existing customer base and with respect for international military standards. On the one hand this guarantees a solid foundation and an almost seamless fit for new fast implementations in defence organisations, on the other hand this allows us to constantly add new functionality, features and improvements.
This web-enabled application runs on three-tier architecture with a robust and reliable Oracle technology stack and with a web-based user interface for maximum scalability and manageability.
Currently, ISC is in the process of developing its next generation software suite, called I3G based on advanced SOA technology. Yet, ISC would like to grasp the opportunity to explain the Battlespace readers a number of functionalities embedded in its product ILIAS.
Functional coverage:
The main strength of ILIAS originates from its design. The entire application is built around the core module “Configuration Management” and is fully integrated.
The use of certain ILIAS modules is possible, but maximum benefit will be achieved by using ILIAS as a fully integrated system running on one single central database (CLDB), a truly MRO and Logistics knowledge centre.
ILIAS consists out of the following functional modules:
Material Management
Configuration Management
Operations Management
Maintenance Management
Deployment & Mobility
Inventory & Warehousing
Budgeting
System Management
Personal Equipment Management
Purchasing
A selected number of these modules will be further described in this editorial.
Material Management
ILIAS Material Management components cover the various aspects of the de