AMS Integrates EPA's Financial Systems

Early last year, American Management Systems, a Fairfax, Va.-based consulting firm that manages financial systems for the Environmental Protection Agency, suggested the EPA use webMethods software to integrate its main financial database with a separate database used by its research and development arm to track budget appropriations, plan lab work and do general accounting.

"They had a pressing business need to integrate the Office of Research and Development Management Information System [OMIS with [the EPA's Integrated Financial Management System," said Kenyon Wells, principal at AMS. "They were doing double data entry and wanted to get it so they could do a single point of entry to allow the EPA staff to focus on their real mission."

John Sykes, program analyst for OMIS, said the project was intended to be the starting point for a larger endeavor to automate connections between all of his office's systems with the EPA's main systems. Because the EPA is publicly funded, however, he had to "make sure we spend the taxpayers' money wisely" before giving the green light.

Basing his decision on intensive cost-benefit analysis, Sykes realized that an integrated system was worth the time and money the agency spends correcting errors that occur with the two-system approach, and he approved the first leg of the project in August.

"I don't know how to calculate the amount of frustration saved by the end users [of the system, but there's got to be a cost savings in there somewhere," he said.

Over several months, AMS connected webMethods' integration platform through XML-based adapters to both the OMIS database and the mainframe system on which the EPA's legacy accounting system is based, said Wells.

At first, security for the project "wasn't a main concern," he said. But after Sept. 11, AMS took extra steps to ensure the solution would be secure. "It was an unexpected thing [and out of the scope of what we originally discussed," said Wells. After Sept. 11, "we had to implement some 128-bit encryption to improve the security, because for the federal government, security is very high on their list."

"[Employees can enter financial transactions into OMIS and those transactions are passed up in realtime to the legacy accounting systems, doing all the edit checks for both systems," said Wells. "If there are any problems, errors are passed back."

The new system will be rolled out officially this month, but Sykes said the EPA has been testing it and training its employees for more than a month. So far, he said, the new system is saving his employees time and helping to alleviate many of the errors made when data was being entered twice.

But while he thinks the new system will be a short-term success, Sykes said its role as a trial run for a longer-term solution is even more valuable.

"I knew from the beginning that we would build on this. We have to integrate with all [of the EPA's main databases sooner or later," he said. "This was the hard work, but the rest of it shouldn't be as hard. That's where the real cost savings will come from,doing more [integration in the future."