The Air Force on Monday awarded IBM an $11.8 million contract to integrate its military personnel and pay processes into one system.
As part of the Air Force Integrated Personnel and Pay System Program (AF-IPPS), IBM will design “an enterprise resource planning-based solution to meet all personnel and pay requirements,” according to a Defense Department announcement. Work is expected to be completed by December 2014.
The new personnel and pay system will replace the Military Personnel Data System (MilPDS) and the Defense Joint Military Pay System (DJMS) for the Air Force, according to a December 2012 Mitre report. The new system will play a key role in helping the Air Force meet its audit goals.
The system will serve about 507,000 service members and “thousands of military leaders of different ranks, specialties, and career fields,” according to the administration’s IT Dashboard, which tracks the status of large technology projects. The Air Force expects the system will reduce annual payroll errors by 75 percent, and allow airmen to be compensated in a timely manner at least 98.5 percent of the time.
The Mitre report also notes the new system will have a self-service capability for airmen to update personal information and access their pay records anytime. However, the system is expected to have more than 100 user interfaces and connections to external systems, which could create technical, cost and schedule challenges, the report said.
2 Comments
Call me cynical, but in light of the many monolithic computerization projects that have failed in recent years, this sounds like one more. It will be late, over budget, and it will fail. Mark my words.
This will never be accomplished for 11 million. Implementation of a large scale ERP solution with over 100 interfaces? IBM low balled this bid big time. I would suspect the final cost of this will be over budget by a factor of 10.