Armed Forces

The Department remains committed to maximising the operational effectiveness of the Armed Forces and ensuring that Defence personnel are focused on activity that best supports front-line outcomes. As set out in the Strategic Defence Review, Defence is taking forward work to move Regular personnel from administrative activity into front-line roles and to automate at least 20% of Human Resources, Finance and Commercial functions by July 2028.

This commitment is being delivered through the Defence Reform and Efficiency Plan, including the Corporate Services Modernisation programme, which is redesigning and modernising Defence's People, Finance and Commercial services. The programme is simplifying policy and processes, standardising activity, consolidating services where appropriate and introducing modern digital tools to reduce manual work, strengthen access to reliable management information and improve the user experience. This will reduce the back-office burden, improve productivity and release capacity for front-line activity while maintaining effective support to all personnel.

Progress has been made. Detailed process and system design across Military and Civilian HR, Finance and Commercial is well advanced. Completed system design identifies opportunity to incorporate AI in both our user experience layer, processing, and service transactions. Early automation has also delivered practical benefits. The Defence Business Services Automation Garage has reduced the time taken to complete routine activity for military personnel, including through the automation of ID request services, the simplification of applications for deceased persons' military records, and the use of Power Apps to remove manual handling and improve processing times. Source to Contract capability is intended to improve front-line procurement by simplifying and standardising commercial processes, reducing re-keying and manual work, improving supplier and contract data, and giving commercial teams better visibility of procurement pipelines and approvals. This will support faster and more consistent procurement activity across Defence and enable commercial professionals to provide more effective support to front-line delivery.

The Department is now in live procurement for its Transformation and Systems Integration partners and looks forward to starting Phase 3, the transformation and build phase, which will bring these changes into operation. This next phase will support the delivery of the 20% automation ambition through modern cloud technology, improved data, new shared service arrangements, and the standardisation and consolidation of activity across the relevant functions and business areas.