Business transformation will let the Army be more flexible, deploy more rapidly and sustain the protracted military campaigns—including joint and expeditionary operations—required by the 21st century security environment.

The Army must also achieve financial transparency in war- fighting and other operations. That requires effectively and efficiently managing its operations and business processes. To do that, the Defense Department and the Army first must fully understand those processes. For its part, DOD—with congressional guidance—is engaged in a broad effort to implement major reforms aimed at delivering financial transparency and visibility as part of the department’s business transformation.

“Serving more than 79,000 end users at nearly 200 Army financial centers around the world, GFEBS will be one of the world’s largest enterprise financial systems.”

Within the Army, a major element of the strategic plan for business transformation is the implementation of commercial enterprise resource planning software to streamline processes now managed by a plethora of stovepiped systems. The number of disparate systems in use severely limits the Army’s ability to quickly adapt its processes in a Defense environment of continuous change.

One ERP program, the General Fund Enterprise Business System (GFEBS), will provide the financial transparency and cost visibility required by commercial and government organizations to be agile and comply with the regulatory mandates in laws such as the Sarbanes-Oxley, Chief Financial Officers and Federal Financial Management Improvement acts. The Army awarded Accenture LLP a $437 million contract to roll out GFEBS.

The Army is testing GFEBS’ viability at a field technology demonstration this spring at Fort Jackson, S.C. If successful, the service will start fielding GFEBS incrementally across the Army by October 2007.

As the Army pursues ERP options, we will be extremely cautious because we are well aware of the many challenges such projects have had to overcome in uses by industry. To help mitigate these challenges, the service is establishing an ERP implementation framework to create an environment that’s conducive to success. Specifically, the Army has established the Enterprise Solution Competency Center. Among other things, the center will establish a repository of reusable ERP information and intellectual property tools. These would include things such as contract verbiage, process maps, configuration documentation and lessons learned.

In a separate initiative, the Army has also set up cross-functional teams to review ERP functionality gaps and overlaps and to identify areas of potential synergy among and between ERP and nonenterprise approaches. Last, the Army is issuing policy and technical guidance for ERP implementation to provide top-level direction for business process improvements. The guides will set technical architecture criteria for ERP efforts and strictly limit modifications of ERP source code.

Serving more than 79,000 end users at nearly 200 Army financial centers around the world, GFEBS will be one of the world’s largest enterprise financial systems. It will replace scores of largely incompatible legacy accounting and financial management systems and eventually manage more than $100 billion per year in financial transactions. More important, GFEBS will provide top-tier Army and DOD leaders with timely, accurate data to make sound business decisions in support of warfighters.

In its own way, GFEBS may be one of the most important “weapons systems” under development when it comes to winning the long war.

Lt. Gen. Steven W. Boutelle is CIO for the Army.

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