Air Force Materiel Command
Putting Power in the Hands of the User
AFMC pays for parts and services for maintaining and repairing the Air Force weapon systems and related infrastructure via the nearly US$17 billion Air Force Working Capital Fund (AFWCF).
Business Needs
Many years ago, to better manage the AFWCF, AFMC developed the Keystone Decision Support System – a data warehouse and data mart that provide visibility into AFWCF financial and logistics operations down to the individual transaction level of detail, along with a business intelligence (BI) system to mine it for information. Over its first few years Keystone grew enormously in usage and value to AFMC, but the legacy BI application could not keep pace. Keystone users wanted to perform more and more sophisticated queries, but because of system limitations they had to turn to an external contractor’s developers – at considerable expense – to implement them. Reports took too long to generate, and analysis was too difficult to perform. The culmination came when the vendor told AFMC that support for the software version in use would soon cease.
Solution
The Keystone team, composed of government and support contractor personnel, performed an internal, informal evaluation of various BI applications rated by analysts as industry leaders in the BI field. Considerations included overall cost to implement and ease of use from both an end-user and maintenance/ developer perspective. The intent was to provide the Keystone user community the ability to do more complex financial analysis and reporting on a “self-service” basis to reduce overall system maintenance and development costs. The team, with valuable input from the user community, determined the SAP® BusinessObjects™ BI software provided the best overall solution to meet the government’s requirement.
The implementation was performed expeditiously with excellent support from SAP, and for three months AFMC ran parallel operations between the two systems. The Keystone team was concerned users would be reluctant to move from the old BI application to the new, but actual experience was just the opposite. Once users were trained on the more intuitive, user friendly functionality of Keystone with the SAP BusinessObjects BI software, response was surprisingly positive, as all users quickly and seamlessly moved to the new version of Keystone.
Benefits
Roll-Your-Own Reporting
Usage of the Keystone system has continued to explode, but this time the BI software has no difficulty keeping up. AFMC has moved from monthly to daily data feeds and has doubled the frequency of in-depth analysis reports. Reports of all kinds appear on decisionmakers’ desks much more quickly than before. Customer feedback to the Keystone team indicates research and analysis time for all levels of financial reporting has been dramatically reduced. This allows analysts to better use their time for in-depth analysis of trends; quicker discovery and correction of transaction anomalies; and faster, more complete reporting for AFWCF end-of-month reporting from field level to the Pentagon.
With users doing their own reporting, AFMC has been able to weather the load while holding IT staffing constant. Still, there are occasions to involve the developers, who are finding the flexibility to accomplish tasks that were never possible before. For example, a recent basic query was built for a specific customer requirement that, based on a certain set of business rules, provides a report that allows the customer to then amend the report for further required analysis, dependent upon the initial results returned. This flexibility for a user to perform complex analytical research without the continual assistance of system developers would not have been possible in the old version of Keystone.
Over the next five years AFMC plans to implement an enterprise solution that includes a role for BI. SAP BusinessObjects software is one of several BI tools being considered as part of the overall toolkit to provide an enterprise solution that meets customers’ needs.