Militaries need to train their personnel to achieve the desired force readiness levels and develop new capabilities. Each has its own approach involving the analysis of requirements, the planning and design of activities, and the exploitation of training data to inform decision making. A modern training management system must facilitate all these activities – preferably using a single, integrated architecture or platform. This has been recognised by a number of training transformation programmes across the world. 4C’s training management tool Exonaut has been the platform of choice for the world’s leading militaries for many years.
This highly scalable and configurable solution enables allied forces across the globe to plan, programme, design, manage and optimise complex exercises, training progressions and experimentation. It allows users to assess, visualise and exploit training data in order to enhance decision support, build capabilities and increase training readiness.
Accredited at Nato Secret, Exonaut is used from Individual to Joint levels across the live, virtual and constructive (LVC) spectrum. It is available as a standalone solution or supported by a team of dedicated staff. Exonaut is deployable with on-premises, cloud-hosted or hybrid options.
A training management tool available at the ‘point of need’
A collective training programme usually requires a progression of exercises delivered across the LVC spectrum. Such activities are complex to plan and execute, often require attendance at specialist, instrumented training sites, and are resource intensive and expensive. As a result, most units will only achieve this level of training every few years. To maintain an edge in the out years, there is an increasing need to deliver training at the lower tactical levels, ‘at the point of need’, in the hands of soldiers and at base or home stations. To meet these requirements, 4C has developed Exonaut to enable point-of-need or home station training, and support collective and individual objective data collection, visualisation and exploitation.
Exonaut provides users with a focused workflow through which to plan, assess and suggest training against requirements and enable the reuse of best-practice training activities designed in the software.
Data-enabled training
Driven by the need to understand the relative balance of training inputs, performance and readiness, there has been a growing demand for objective data collection, analytics and visualisation. Integrations with authoritative data sources such as LVC simulations and other sensor technologies offer assured inputs and, increasingly, provide automated data to inform specific effectiveness metrics.
4C has configured the Exonaut training management tool (designated in British Army service as ‘Mimir’), which allows it to augment subjective observations with objective data while maintaining the fundamental contextual link to training objectives, associated training audience and activity. Training data is also important to the individual user. The recent explosion in the popularity of sports and fitness tracking apps is a clear indication of the potential of such devices.
To this end, 4C has developed an individual training solution (designated ‘MyMimir’ in the British Army), which allows soldiers to visually track, analyse and display key performance indicators (including objective and subjective measures) to monitor individual performance in collective training. 4C’s solutions for responsive, data-enabled, modern training management tools empower users to automate training design and execution, integrate and exploit training data, and provide commanders with the information they need to understand training readiness, take decisions and develop capability.