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The Non-Appropriated Funds (NAF) Travel Pay office at Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) Texarkana has an interesting mission. They are responsible for making payments for Morale and Welfare Recreation (MWR) program travel.
This includes programs like the military Olympians who traveled for the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo and Army West Point Athletics, such as the Black Knights football team. Unfortunately, up until May of 2020, they were mired in mountains of paperwork.
"If we got in 100 claims a day, those claims are usually a min of 7-10 pages each, so you're talking about stacks and stacks of paper," said Sondra Rust, analyst and project manager for DFAS Texarkana's automation project.
Not only was the paperwork daunting, but also the process from a claim coming in to being paid and logged in the system for tax purposes was exhaustive. After claims arrived, each one was printed and date stamped in the mailroom. Then, the claims went into a bin for the travel clerks to pick up. After that, they were physically transferred, multiple times, between several different departments. This created numerous opportunities for paperwork to be lost or misplaced.
"We worked in a locked environment, but the biggest risk was that there was no document accountability. So, if paperwork got misplaced or lost there was no way to know," said Rust.
Luckily, in 2019, Texarkana realized it was time for a change. Rust helped bring together experts from across DFAS to review several different manual processes and give recommendations on what could be automated.
"We learned how to properly evaluate processes and change the mindset of, 'that is how we have always done it,'" said Rust. "We began creating a climate that believes we can make positive automations with successful outcomes."
Through this NAF Automation Summit, led by the help of their Enterprise Project Solutions (EPS) partner Jonathan Pittman, DFAS Texarkana developed a digital workflow solution for the problem.
Creating a script that funnels all incoming travels to a shared drive helped achieve this automation. The travel clerks now retrieve the claims from that drive and upload them to SharePoint. From there, they can process the claims, and the transfer between different departments now happens digitally.
From a customer standpoint, this creates a huge benefit. Call volume about missing claims is down significantly, and if a customer does question where their payment is, the NAF Travel Pay office can see exactly where in the process the claim sits. Additionally, they can quickly process the payment within a five-day window of time.
DFAS Texarkana also reaped several benefits from this automation program. For example, they now have real-time reporting of claim accountability and visibility. Automating the manual process also made it possible for employees to telework during the height of the COVID-19 outbreak. Additionally, $56,000 was saved on document management and labor costs.
The NAF Travel Pay automation project serves as a shining example of how DFAS can better serve its customers and streamline tedious workflows. Thanks to the success of this project, DFAS Texarkana is now looking at other manual processes to automate.
| Date Taken: | 02.08.2022 |
| Date Posted: | 02.08.2022 13:31 |
| Story ID: | 414267 |
| Location: | CLEVELAND, OH, US |
| Web Views: | 37 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, DFAS Supports Army Olympians through Travel Pay Automation Project, by Anthony Hardman, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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