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Business and Requirements Overview

Business Overview

Personal Property Management Systems (PPMS)

The GSA Office of Personal Property Management (PPM) uses multiple systems that reside on Unisys Clearpath mainframe architecture. PPM depends on 7 disparate applications to manage the asset disposal life cycle of the federal personal property assets. The applications were originally architected using legacy mainframe-server technology and the 7 legacy apps were built in Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL). The 7 legacy systems are:

PPM has two divisions that use these systems: Utilization and Donation (U&D) and Sales.

Utilization and Donation (U&D)

GSAXcess is the legacy system used by the Utilization and Donation division. The U&D provides Federal Agencies with the ability to report, transfer and donate surplus federal property via GSAXcess web application. The GSAXcess platform is used for utilization and donations of surplus Federal personal property. GSAXcess is a web enabled platform that eligible customers use to access all customer functions: reporting, searching and selecting property. In addition, GSAXcess handles several GSA-internal functions. The system is available to three groups of users: (1) Federal Agencies, (2) authorized non-federal recipients, and (3) surplus customers.

Sales

The remaining 6 legacy systems are used by the Sales division. The Sales division supports the disposal of surplus personal property. The Sales systems support the sale, auction, and disposal of surplus federal personal property. The systems automate many of the processes that FAS needs to sell about $300 million worth of personal property each year. The application is used to process the receipt and sale of surplus government property in an efficient, expeditious manner and obtain maximum net returns with a minimum of inconvenience to holding agencies.

Modernizing the PPM Systems

Personal Property Management is currently in the process of transforming the applications using emerging open source technologies and cloud platform suitable to the needs of all the PPM functions. These systems and tools are integrated internally and externally with each other and several other applications in GSA systems, third party payment systems (TPPSs), private and other federal agency systems.

A high-level map of the business architecture for this modernization is shown below, depicting the various microservices that the business processes are separate into.

Figure 1: PPMS High-Level Architecture View