The Department of Defense (DoD) is seeking a prototype that establishes the capability to manage electronic parts across the enterprise. The purpose of this prototype is to grant visibility into the supply chain, enable better supply chain risk management, allow aggregation of demand, improve purchasing power, enable collaborative solutions to obsolescence and other parts related issues, reduce the risk of counterfeit parts, and enable more DoD wide design modernization. EPMS will enable better microelectronics-focused parts selection and management throughout the entire life cycle of an acquisition program. By aggregating part data at the Service and DoD level, the EPMS will provide unprecedented insight into supply chains enterprise wide. Such insight will lead to improvements in traditional and cyber supply chain risk management, hardware assurance, collaborative solutions to obsolescence and other parts related issues, counterfeit prevention, and DoD wide design modernization. In addition, the demand consolidation made possible by EPMS will increase DoD’s purchasing power through economies of scale.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is looking for small business concerns and/or nontraditional defense contractors, that do not have facility clearances but are interested in performing classified work for the Department of Defense (DoD). The BRIDGES initiative seeks to assist small companies with disruptive ideas gain facility clearances so that they can bring innovation to the DoD, and help solve classified technical challenges.

A virtual Q&A session will be held on October 24, 2022, from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm eastern time. Registration for the Q&A session is required by October 19, 2022