The Department of Veterans Affairs last week began the task of modernizing its core financial and logistics systems. The project, known as coreFLS, will replace more than 100 distinct systems with a single, Web-based solution.
CoreFLS will affect systems for purchasing, contract management, inventories, facilities management, collections, payments and general ledgers.
After the conclusion of a pilot program designed to validate VA's product choice, Oracle Corp.'s Oracle Federal Financials enterprise resource planning system, the department hopes to have its new system operational by October 2002.
"Our new system is going to be fully integrated," said Eileen Powell, VA's coreFLS project director. Currently, the systems are stovepiped and do not talk with one another, Powell said. "Now we are forever reconciling between one system's data and another's."
In fact, according to a recent study conducted by Booz, Allen & Hamilton Inc., VA financial analysts spend 30 percent of their time reconciling data from multiple systems. To Powell, this is time that analysts could be spending on analysis and improved decision-making. "People that have been doing tedious work will be able to do more analytical work," Powell said. "This is what many of them should be doing- but we are burdened with all the reconciliation."
In addition to time savings, VA officials hope the new system will decrease the amount of money spent on maintaining the old systems and training employees to use them. "Up to now, our users have had to be trained on multiple systems," Powell said. "Now they'll be trained on one system."
Plus, the new system will be more user friendly. "Our workers have a different password and log-on for all the department's numerous systems," Powell said. "With this system, our workers will have one password and one log-on."
Instead of customizing a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) product to mimic its own business processes, the VA plans to implement the processes built into Oracle's offering. "We intend to use COTS software with no customization," Powell said. "We want to maximize the best business practices inherent in the software."
The VA hopes the new system will keep most of its financial work online. "We want to be in position where we interact electronically with potential vendors," Powell said. "We want to sell services to our customers electronically and make payments electronically. We also want to conduct reverse auctions online."
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