While the Army fully migrated one of its largest enterprise financial systems to the cloud, the service still relies on several legacy systems to move its financial transactions. The service is currently working on divesting two of its oldest accounting systems to date — the Standard Financial System, or STANFINS, stood up in 1965, and the Standard Operation and Maintenance Army Research and Development System, or SOMARDS, introduced in the late 1970s. 

“One of the most fascinating aspects of STANFINS and SOMARDS — the requirements that built STANFINS were based on World War II. So when you start thinking about auditability, processes that evolved and best practices, there was a necessity to actually migrate into a new platform such as the ERPs and SAP,” Erika Del Valle, cBEYONData Army project lead, told Federal News Network.

The Defense Department uses more than 4,500 systems, at least 232 of which are financial systems subject to the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act. This act requires that systems capture data and record transactions properly. The department set a goal to modernize its financial systems by 2028.

The process of divesting these legacy systems is a lot more complex than a simple “lift and shift,” Del Valle said. Each system presents unique challenges since some legacy systems can be phased out through policy, while some divestments involve mapping data elements from the old system to a new enterprise resource system. The process requires translating and converting the old data into a format compatible with the new system and then identifying and addressing audit and archiving requirements to make sure the data meets legal and regulatory standards.

And some of the Army’s older systems have complex, specialized processes that haven’t been fully integrated into the new ERP systems, which is why those old systems are still around.

“It’s one thing to take a legacy system and to divest that system. It’s another thing to write it to a newer system. And I guess the greatest hurdle is basically the validation that, according to the laws, policies and regulations that, we are, in fact, capturing the full need within that enduring system,” Bradley Knick, Army legacy divestment manager, told Federal News Network.

In its latest divestiture, the service used robotic process automation for repetitive tasks. During the process, the service developed a bot to help end users with tasks such as creating purchase requisitions and posting obligations.  A process that would usually take a couple of days, including moving a transaction, posting a purchase request and generating a purchase order, was reduced to just an hour. 

Automating those routine tasks now allows end users to focus on ensuring the accuracy of data and transactions rather than on data entry. The service also leveraged data analytics to help determine where user interaction is most valuable.

“One of our main goals is to minimize the impact on end users, as well as maintaining auditability. So, one of our biggest challenges is that these are not auditable systems. The legacy systems were not previously auditable, and now we are putting them in auditable systems. So we have to reconcile items from the 1980s,” Del Valle said.

“One of our biggest challenges was in SOMARDS. We were moving foreign military sales transactions that basically needed research from the 1980s, so we had to go back in all the records to look at contracts and original agreements and then make them auditable when we placed them into the ERPs.”

Aging workforce

There is also a sense of urgency to modernize the service’s antiquated financial systems due to the aging workforce and the loss of historical knowledge about older financial systems. Once these experienced employees retire, it will become a lot more difficult to replace their expertise when maintaining and migrating these older systems.

“We’re talking about technology that is not even being currently taught in schools because it is antiquated. There isn’t a new crop of coders or solution architects that are familiar with these processes or systems,” Del Valle said.

“One of the biggest challenges is that we were actually competing with other priorities, with a system that had only one COBOL developer. Basically, this one COBOL developer across the entire organization was the only person that can make updates to the system so we can actually get data out.”

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