The Commander of the Multinational Corps Northeast (MNC NE) Lieutenant General Rainer Korff as well as Dr Andrzej M. Wilk, President and Director in General of the Telecommunications Research Institute (PIT), and Henryk Kantecki, a member of the Board, signed an addendum to the contract on the Command, Control and Information System SZAFRAN used by the Corps. The ceremony was held in Baltic Barracks on 6 July 2010.
“It is a very important step in order to improve our SZAFRAN system,” said the Corps Commander Lieutenant General Rainer Korff to all the gathered guests. Among them there were representatives of the Telecommunications Research Institute, members of HQ MNC NE G-6 Division, a Legal Adviser and other members of the Headquarters. “People are more important than systems,” stressed Dr Andrzej M. Wilk and congratulated the Commander on his excellent staff. He also emphasized the effective and close cooperation between his company and the Headquarters personnel and underlined the importance of developing SZAFRAN as such.
The original contract was signed in December 2007 but both the Headquarters and the Company have found it necessary to improve the system. “We are provided with additional functionalities to the original software,” Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Griesshammer, a project manager from the Headquarters side, explained the importance of the addendum. “The first and the most important thing is that we get the connection to our logistic functional area subsystem,” he stressed. Another area of development is the connection to the Air Command, Control and Information Systems used elsewhere in Europe, also in the future. The third advantage is a new demonstration version of SZAFRAN, which shall be used for training purposes. As Lieutenant Colonel Griesshammer explained, the existing software will be improved, too: “All in all, we get 11 single improvements within the software”. All changes within the SZAFRAN system will prove to be very useful during the next Little Eagle exercise, planned for the next year.
The Command and Control Information System is an Information Technology-based system that provides commanders and staff officers (end users) with core and functional services helping them to accomplish their tasks at headquarters or command posts in operation. C2IS enables gathering, processing and exchanging of data. This system also includes operational and technical procedures.
