QUANTICO, Va. – DCSA has consistently embraced an unwavering commitment to fiscal responsibility, with its Office of the Chief Financial Officer (OCFO) at the forefront of financial management modernization. A key enabler of financial management at the speed of the mission? Intelligent automation.
Intelligent automation can manipulate, move, reconcile, verify and process data to liberate staff from tasks one might classify as pesky or tedious, empowering a shift of focus to more high-value, strategic work.
In total, OCFO has saved over 17,200 manpower hours across 28 automated solutions.
Each automated solution saves hundreds to thousands of manpower hours, but also provides analysts with real-time visibility into data, maintaining the integrity of financial accounts and providing a clear picture of financial information.
OCFO designs, builds, deploys and maintains automations using robotic process automation, digital process automation, machine learning and predictive analytics to optimize and accelerate repetitive, manual tasks —tasks that often process high volumes of data susceptible to error.
According to OCFO’s Financial Management Systems and Data Division, OCFO’s automation capability is supported by thorough data cleansing and ample testing to ensure a consistent framework and seamless business integration. The result is a more agile and effective financial management operation that works off the same data assumptions.
While many solutions operate within existing OCFO processes, several interact with systems leveraged by greater DCSA and throughout the federal government.
The Defense Agencies Initiative (DAI) Deactivation Automation, for example, ensures timely and accurate deactivation of DCSA users within the DAI system. It extracts user data from DAI, filters and organizes based on various criteria, identifies accounts requiring deactivation, and initializes and completes deactivation requests. The tool eliminates the need for manual data handling across large volumes of data, saving valuable time, reducing the risk of human error and ensuring compliance with agency protocols. As a result, user data is consistent across platforms, supporting strong user maintenance and auditability. The DAI Deactivation Automation also offers scalability to address other systems’ maintenance needs.
Another automation, the G-Invoicing Orders Outreach Automation, automatically interacts with the G-Invoicing system — a Treasury application to create, manage and approve interagency agreements (IAAs) – to identify orders (known as 7600Bs) requiring updates and then send targeted alerts to customers who have not submitted required forms for the current fiscal year. With around 400 emails sent and a series of reminder notifications, the automation reduces manual follow-up efforts and significantly improves customer responsiveness. By automatically updating tracking documents with the latest status, this solution helps maintain accurate records and boosts operational efficiency, while also billing tasks for the new fiscal year on time for a smoother transition into the next fiscal period.
One OCFO automation interfaces with yet another system – the Billing and Collections Capability on the ServiceNow-based Enterprise Service Delivery Platform. In as few as five weeks, OCFO developed an automation to upload and configure DOD’s Continuous Vetting (CV) data to deduce key information for month-to-month CV billing needs. Rather than sifting through over four million raw data points monthly — a time-consuming effort with cumbersome file sizes and Personally Identifiable Information (PII) requiring heavy resourcing for encrypting, decrypting and matching — analysts instead leverage the CV Load Automation to extract positive deltas (i.e., new subjects to start billing) and negative deltas (i.e., inactive subjects to stop billing). The CV Load Automation dramatically speeds up processing time for appropriate billing actions, while masking PII through separate unique identifiers that protect subject identity. Due to automation, the data loading rate soared from 1,300 subjects an hour to 30,000.
OCFO’s automations are transformative in both boosting organizational workload capacity and maintaining strong data validity: automated processes eliminate inconsistencies, redundancies and errors from datasets to ensure that data remains trustworthy, reliable, compliant and usable for analytical and operational purposes. This automation effort advances DCSA’s data accuracy while securing a more streamlined, responsive and efficient financial operations environment to adequately support the DCSA national security mission.
DCSA’s journey with financial management automation will continue to expand across business processes as OCFO plans to implement more solutions that focus on reconciling data between critical systems like DAI, G-Invoicing, and other fiscal tools and programs.