Idaho National Laboratory Business Systems and Pro Page: 46 of 56
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Systems Strategy
The INL does not seem to have a business systems strategy that is integrated either with the
Laboratory level strategy or even the Business Management strategy. In general, it appears like the
Mission Enabling Organizations that have money have the ability to do system enhancements while other
Mission Enabling Organizations might have to do without. An example of this appears to be in the
strategy for the new Laboratory Intelligence tool where it appears IM Services has been demonstrating the
capabilities to various organizations and have then been funded by several of these organizations to
enhance the product for items that are of interest to those organizations.
Overall the systems that support the Business Management organization appear to generally perform
the required activities for the individual business segments (AP versus AR, etc.) but in general it was not
clear how system enhancements and changes are gathered and prioritized. In addition, the lack of
Laboratory strategy and funding has caused some systems to age to the point where in the near future they
will either be required to pay additional maintenance for support or not be supported at all by the vendors.
Another factor of the age of the Oracle modules, specifically, is an increase in cyber security
vulnerabilities given that they have not been upgraded in several years. However, not all systems are out
of date as PeopleSoft Time and Labor was recently upgraded to version 9.1.
There are two recommendations in this area to improve the INL's systems strategy. First, we
recommend someone do an overall assessment of the systems at the INL and work with the directors of
the Mission Enabling Organizations to put a systems roadmap together that describes where INL would
like to go in the next three to five years. As a part of this roadmap we would suggest INL evaluate the
"best of breed" strategy that has been implemented to date. We heard from several individuals that system
integration was one of the biggest pain points. Secondly, as part of the moving to a portfolio approach to
managing indirect budgets, we recommend the system improvement budgets be centralized and managed
by a committee to achieve the direction set in the roadmap described above.
Impactful Information in a Timely Manner
As we met with a cross section of Accounting, Planning and Financial Controls, Modeling, and
Research staff, a consistent theme that emerged was getting timely, impactful information to make
decisions.
The timeliness of financial data was a big concern from staff both from a project management
perspective as well as a STARS perspective. Currently, labor costs are not published to BDSIS until
Wednesday morning which makes them available in reports and for querying. All other costs are
generally available in BDSIS on Monday mornings. The delay in labor is because there are three different
work schedules with one schedule ending at 7:00 AM on Monday morning. It then takes payroll
approximately a day and a half to process time cards and release the job to process cost. Once this job is
complete than labor costs can be published to BDSIS.
The second theme that emerged was access to the essential information that staff require to make
decisions. This need was the basis of the Laboratory Intelligence project which is designed to give staff
the required information to do their jobs. In many cases this information might not be financial in nature.
An example might be publications on a LDRD project or the safety record of a particular technical group.
However, for this project to be successful it is recognized that the financial information will be a key
piece of the puzzle.
We had two recommendations regarding providing timely and impactful information to decision
makers. First, we recommend that the INL pursue consistent cut-off times for feeder systems to improve
the timeliness of information to project managers. The biggest area of opportunity in this area is creating a
cutoff for processing labor cost on Friday evenings. This may require that the processes for time reporting
and payroll be thought of as two separate processes. While the INL would still have 3 distinct payroll
schedules all labor cost to projects would be reported on a Saturday to Friday basis. So in the case of a36
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Hensley, Susan. Idaho National Laboratory Business Systems and Pro, report, June 1, 2013; Idaho Falls, Idaho. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc832781/m1/46/: accessed April 24, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.