Published 1 April 2025
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The transformation of DE&S has reached a significant milestone.
From 28th March, 100 per cent of our staff started working in a new organisational design with an improved management approach.
A central part of the DE&S Strategy, our new operating model is the biggest transformation at DE&S in a decade, responding to a radically changing and more threatening world. It has been designed to improve our efficiency, productivity and delivery for UK Armed Forces.
Developed by our own teams, industry, wider-Defence and our armed forces partners, our new model is focused on speeding up and streamlining processes, simplifying our structure, strengthening our culture, better managing our people and improving how we deploy resources.
One of the key changes has been moving away from working in our traditional, siloed domains of Land, Ships, Air and Strategic Enablers. These have been replaced by new interlinked business areas driving a more strategic and efficient structure to improve insight to support better, faster requirement setting and increased agility to focus more of our resources on delivering Defence’s top priorities.
We are now a nimbler and more responsive organisation with more of its people delivering the UK’s Equipment Plan portfolio and have the foundations in place for faster, smarter defence procurement for UK Armed Forces.
Delivering benefits
As a result of our changes, we have freed up resource and time by cutting waste, reducing duplication and streamlining processes through automation. This has increased productivity and the ability, under our new people management approach, to move people around the business to where they are needed most.
An example of increased efficiency can be seen in the way our capability innovation team has been able to blend the requirements of allies and our own armed forces to explore the use of a particular system or platform, meaning multiple mission partners can share the benefit of each other’s requirements.
As our new ways of working continue to stabilise, we will drive operational excellence for Defence. This means effective, reliable, consistent, and repeatable outcomes across all of DE&S so we can deliver faster procurement of better integrated equipment, with improved availability of key platforms for UK Armed Forces.
DE&S is also in a strong position to support Defence Reform, the MOD’s programme to establish the organisational changes needed to ensure Defence can become an outcome-focused organisation to keep the UK secure at home and strong abroad.
Find out more about what we do at DE&S.
Defence Experts Delivering for the Nation
DE&S helps our armed forces protect the nation, our territories and our allies. Few other organisations have a higher collective purpose. It’s this purpose that drives our experts to deliver every day, making sure the soldiers, sailors and aviators serving our country have what they need to succeed.
Partnering with industry for growth
Our commitment extends beyond delivering world-class equipment and support to the UK Armed Forces; we are dedicated to supporting UK economic growth, driving exports, championing sustainability and creating social value across our operations and the contracts we place with industry.
