CASE STUDY 1: GovTrip Implementation to CORE for conditioning migration to
UFMS
Problem
All federal government agencies have been directed by the President’s Office of
Management and Budget (OMB) to implement a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS)
electronic (“E”) travel solution. The COTS solution had to be one of the General
Services Administration’s approved COTS solutions. For most federal government
agencies, this would mean replacing the older legacy travel systems with these new “E”
Travel system solutions including supporting the interfaces to other systems and revising
the agencies’ business processes.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) moved forwarded an
acquired a COTS solution, Northrop Grumman’s GovTrip. The Program Support Center
(PSC) was challenged with an accelerated schedule that would require the system to be
used with the legacy system environment (CORE financial and accounting system)
before new support environment (UFMS) and then moved at a later date to the to the
Unified Financial Management System (UFMS) that was replacing CORE. Key was
implementing the E-Gov Travel solution in such a way that it allowed a transparent
transaction (transition) to future UFMS with “No Cost” impact.
Solution
Starry Associates, Inc. reviewed the “As is” of the current Travel Management System
(TMS). All Transaction Codes, Users, Travelers, Object Classes, and associated
accounting transaction impacts to the General Ledger (GL) were mapped via use,
processes, impact to program, application to department policies, and usability. Starry
Associates, Inc. developed and implemented the “Back Office” interfaces from GovTrip
into the CORE system, passing all audit and processes reviews (SAS70 and OMB‘s A123). In addition, we assisted in providing the functional support with the end users of
GovTrip, training, and the data clean up and close out of past trips in TMS. Once
GovTrip was up and stable, our staff developed an “explosion” and derived a crosswalk
process that was applied to the UFMS conversion of CORE legacy data. This allowed for
the transparent conversion of data, and an immediate “go-live” support of GovTrip upon
completion of the UFMS conversion, and was fully reconciled (3 transaction lines to 5
transaction lines). Starry Associates, Inc. completed the work ahead of schedule,
including program changes and testing, and held to a quality process of 100%
reconciliation of the values within the system.
Outcome
Starry Associates, Inc. has assisted the PSC to successfully go through two major
conversions of data and financial accounting transactions regarding the GovTrip system.
There was minimal impact to the operations and almost absolute transparency to the users
on the front end and back end offices. The client was successful in the conversion and
led to them being established as the Center for Excellence for the HHS enterprise-wide EGov Travel solution.