A new platform has been unveiled to give the Department of Defense (DoD) and major manufacturers real-time visibility into US production capacity.
The Surge Production & Readiness Command (SPARC) has been set up to help the DoD and its suppliers 'act faster, reduce single-source risk, and deliver systems at relevant scale.' Authentise, Kform and OpenWerks have built the platform, designing it to deliver secure, machine-verified supply chain transparency inside a zero-trust tunnel to Azure GovCloud, with a path to full CMMC and ITAR compliance.
It has been initially funded by the Defense Logistics Agency and will connect directly to manufacturing machines, MES systems, and supplier data feeds to turn live production activity into evidence of readiness. Defence buyers will therefore be able to verify which suppliers have available, qualified capacity.
The SPARC dashboard has three levels of insight, covering Supply Chain Health, Demand Absorption, and Supplier Gantt. The first uses a map of qualified suppliers with filters by process, certification, and utilisation, while the Demand Absorption functionality uses surge simulations to show delivery wave plans and stress points. SPARC's Supplier Gantt functionality provides machine-level proof of throughput, idle time, and readiness to deliver.
Recent pilot cases have been built on and tested against DoD demand signals, like the challenge of helping a U.S. drone producer scale from 100 to 10,000 units per month. Next, the team plans to onboard 100+ suppliers, integrate additional MES and sensor data, and expand from capacity visibility to assured delivery.
“When a surge hits, forecasts fail and guesswork costs time,” said Callye Keen, CEO of Kform, one of the SPARC development partners. “SPARC shows, in near real time, who can build what — and how fast. We must plan for success and confidently answer the challenge of scaling production.”
“SPARC bridges the gap between promise and proof,” Andre Wegner, CEO of Authentise, added. “For DoD, it’s how we achieve surge resilience without relying on foreign capacity. For suppliers, it’s the new credential: verifiable readiness.”
