Telesto Group Wins $40M+ Contract for USTRANSCOM
Telesto Group today announced it was selected to create a prototype, in accordance with 10 USC 2371(b), to start work as the Lead Systems Integrator (LSI) for an upgrade to the United States Transportation Command’s (USTRANSCOM) Transportation Management (TM) solution. Telesto Group and its subcontractors from CACI, SAP-NS2, KPMG, and Leidos will support USTRANSCOM’s mission and provide functional, secure, and global solutions that move people, supplies, and equipment to customers during peace and war.
“As a small to mid-size business, Telesto is proud to be trusted as the LSI on this complex, large-scale, and joint forces project to plan and implement what will be part of the foundation of USTRANSCOM’s future TM operational infrastructure,” said Soren Hastrup, Telesto Group CEO. “With our larger and diverse industry partners, we will bring together a confluence of TM and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems integration experience in order to elevate USTRANSCOM’s ability to deliver people, supplies, and equipment faster, more efficiently, and with better tracking and accountability.”
USTRANSCOM awarded the initial $40M+ contract to Telesto Group through the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Other Transactional Authority (OTA) acquisition process, which is a flexible business tool that accepts submission for contracts from non-traditional defense contractors in order to promote innovation. This process ensures smarter and more efficient acquisition of work and deliverables by streamlining the selection process for certain types of acquisitions. In all, this process brings technology and deliverables to Soldiers and users more quickly and cost effectively. For this contract, the acquisition process began in November 2017 and work began in March 2018, a four-month timeframe from Request for Proposal to contract award. This greatly reduces the time from request to action versus the traditional acquisition timeframe for a project of this size and scope. “What Telesto proved is that when presented with a problem statement, we were able to quickly bring together a team and through iterative innovation sessions deliver an outstanding commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS)-based TM solution proposal to USTRANSCOM, beating out 22 other companies,” added Hastrup.
The long-term goal of this initial implementation is to retire a series of transportation legacy systems and create a long-term operational TM solution for USTRANSCOM. Telesto Group will design, develop, and deploy the initial TM solution in several phases. This will include the ability to deliver cargo and asset visibility within the scenarios chosen by the Command, and include everything from cybersecurity, scalability, strong lifecycle management, change management, and training to business process re-engineering, using better buying power principles, and supporting the DoD’s requirement for fully-auditable financial systems.
“We are building our solution on top of a secure and FedRAMP-certified Cloud provided by our partners from SAP-NS2,” added Hastrup. “Combined with our subcontractors and our teaming approach with the government, we are simply driving innovation from concept to delivery with a speed not seen in your typical DoD program acquisition of this size.”