Integrated Award Environment

Introduction:

What is SAM?

The System for Award Management (SAM.gov) is an official website of the U.S. Government required by statute. Entities from the Acquisition Community and Financial Assistance Community use SAM.gov to:

• Register to do business with the U.S. Government
• Update, renew, or check the status of your entity registration
• Search for entity registration and exclusion records
• Search for assistance listings (formerly CFDA.gov), wage determinations (formerly WDOL.gov), contract opportunities (formerly FBO.gov), and contract data reports (formerly part of FPDS.gov).
• View and submit BioPreferred and Service Contract Reports
• Access publicly available award data via data extracts and system accounts

This white paper/case study focuses on the methodology used to address the Business challenge of modernizing the Contract Data Reports. Specifically migrating the users Ad-Hoc reports from the legacy Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) Informatica technology tool to Microstrategy reporting tool on SAM.gov.

Business Challenge:

IAE IT was presented a business requirement to migrate several thousand users ad-hoc reports from the legacy Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) data architecture and reporting tool technology to align to the new Databank and reports technology and data architecture.

IAE IT’s vision of providing the best Customer Experience:

In the FPDS system, advanced users accumulated many reusable Ad-Hoc reports. Converting these FPDS Ad-Hoc reports from the existing FPDS BI platform (Informatica) to SAM.gov (MicroStrategy) would help them to save time or effort when recreating these reusable Ad-Hoc reports in SAM.gov.

IAE Vision on Migration of Ad-Hoc Reporting:

• Retirement of Informatica
• Requirement to capture all Ad-Hoc Reports used within the last 13 months – Establish a Freeze Date
• 3100+ Users to be Migrated
• 15,000+ Reports to be migrated
• Automation of Migration via Bots
• Establish Go-Live Production Date

IAE IT solution approach:

The IAE IT Operations team identified an opportunity to conduct a Proof of Concept (PoC) to leverage RPA Bot technology to accomplish this migration. Solution Methodology:

The PoC was successful in the feasibility of this approach with roughly a 90% accuracy. From there the team analyzed the remaining 10% data accuracy and identified an opportunity to tweak the RPA Bot and data mapping to increase data accuracy to 99%.

Technical Analysis of the Data to be Captured:

FPDS Ad-Hoc report migration required the following types of data:

• Users and their reports relationship with reports profile
• Static elements such as attributes and metrics to support report creation
• Report metadata containing attributes, metrics, filters, filter identifier, rankings, table layout, calculations, formatting, sorting, charting

Process Behind Translation of Data

• The migration process for step 1 required manual work to populate static metrics, attributes, filters, and layout repositories. Also, it required a mapping of calculations and aggregate functions between PowerAnalyzer and MSTR built-in functions.
• In step 2, Bots were created to export FPDS reports metadata from FPDS and then re- create them the same way as the user would do on the MSTR platform. The difference is that they would be done by the Bots with scripts. Once the reports are migrated, users must see them when they login from SAM.gov DataBank.

Full Conversion Process:

Benefits:

The IAE IT team estimated it would take roughly 15 minutes to manually recreate each Ad-hoc report for the individual FPDS Ad-Hoc user reports. Using the RPA Bot, the team spent roughly 260 labor hours with the PoC, tuning and executing. The calculation for savings efficiency is 15 minutes per report X (multiplied) by approximately 40,000 reports this number included reports for PoC plus reports converted to meet the initial freeze date and the subsequent final freeze date = 600,000 minutes ÷ 60 minutes per hour = 10,000 hours - 260 hours to develop and execute RPA Bots = 9,740 hours.

Conclusion:

This case study clearly documents the technology approach and the vision IAE IT Operations team conceptualized/implemented to address a business challenge and thereby providing the best Customer Experience for users to not re-create the reports in the new modernized MicroStrategy environment. Using the Bots technology reduced burden, improved productivity, improved overall efficiency, and customer experience.