Navy enhancing automation to onboarding and offboarding processes for better customer experience

The Office of Naval Research is developing an automated hiring portal, within the Navy, to track employee’s information during onboarding and offboarding processes to improve customer experience.

The Navy is supported by ONR as they provide research dealing with autonomy, directed energy and promote science and technology programs. ONR is constantly looking for new talents all over the world while having the largest total of PhDs in any federal agency, from trained scientists to research professionals.

ONR’s customer experience is exceptional, but they’re still spending a lot of time looking into automation and areas where they can improve. Curtis Pelzer, chief information officer at the Office of Naval Research, said ONR is looking at reducing the time it takes to onboard personnel and providing more information to leadership on why employees are leaving during the offboarding process.

“In terms of our onboarding process, a lot of that process is manual. And when we identify … a potential hiring candidate, a lot of that initial interaction between a hiring candidate happens manually. And what we’re looking to do is that once we make contact with that individual, in terms of all the forms that they need to fill out to become a federal employee or if you’re transitioning in from another federal agency, is to provide all that information online and what we’re calling a program or hiring portal, where they log in, and they are able to see all the information that they need in terms of completing forms and being able to transmit those forms back to the hiring manager,” Pelzer said on Federal Monthly Insight — Customer Experience. “And, then, after the employee has been onboarded to the command, being able to automate the entire lifecycle of that employee, so all those documents that were generated during the hiring process are made available to that employee.”

Pelzer mentions the customer in the end-to-end lifecycle is everyone involved in the onboarding process, including hiring managers, supervisors, and HR personnel. He also views the new hiring portal as individual roles when going through the process of onboarding and offboarding personnel.

“The system would provide for the individual roles that are needed to make sure that the employee lifecycle is being met, and the things that the employee would need during the tenure lifecycle. I speak of this in terms of lifecycle, because I believe that there’s a beginning, which is the onboarding process. And then if you would look at the sustainment of that employee is doing their tenure. And then the offboarding process, which would entail like, how do you recover those assets that have been provisioned for the employee during their tenure with the organization? And then how do you successfully off board that employee making sure that they have everything that they need when they’re departing the organization,” Pelzer said.

Having that information stored in the portal provides a greater insight into why an employee decides to leave an agency and enhances the automated process in the future.

Prior to the development of the new automated portal, ONR has experienced issues automating processes due to their existing manual process. Originally, they would overlay new technology over the manual process — but would not receive a level of efficiency they were expecting.

Artificial intelligence has also been a conversation at ONR, as they’re working on AI-enabled capabilities. Pelzer says the challenge is identifying what data will be allowed, and making sure the data remains secure, not putting anything at risk.

“We have been looking at using bots using robotic process automation to help streamline routine processes that we believe can be done better by a bot, or using an AI. And most certainly bring a level of efficiency to these processes like onboarding and offboarding of personnel and tracking personnel better,” Pelzer told the Federal Drive with Tom Temin. “One area that we want to make sure that when we’re providing this automation, is that we keep the security aspect of that data. When you look at our data and analytics program, we’re building AI-enabled capabilities every single day. And these are taking systems that we’ve already built, and then layering that generative AI on top of that, to be able to better serve our workforce, to give them an additional capability that we previously didn’t have, prior to the advancement of AI.”

ONR is also looking at new ways to track metrics on how many personnel are onboarding and offboarding. Currently, they’re manually capturing these metrics. For Pelzer, looking at metrics provides insight when it comes to a call for resolution and meeting customer needs.

“One thing that’s the most gratifying in terms of customer satisfaction is the messages that I receive from the customer to say, ‘hey, well done, that your team has done something that I didn’t think was possible,’ or the response time, or the level of satisfaction at the customer received from that support that they received from my team. So, the metrics certainly give you insight into how well your team is performing. We look at the data, but having those notes that come in for email or chat message saying ‘job well done,’ I think is really something that I look forward to,” Pelzer said.

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