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Ensuring Accuracy and Reducing Risk
 

Challenge

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Financial Accounting and Integrated Management Information System (FAIMIS) project replaced its legacy core accounting system and five financial feeder systems with Momentum, a COTS financial system. The NRC replaced a complex billing system (License Fee Billing or LFB) which calculates fees and produces receivable invoices based on specific, legislative algorithms. NRC is also replacing an intricate standalone cost accounting system with the cost accounting module within Momentum. Further, numerous custom interfaces for LFB, payroll, and cost accounting were developed. Additionally, the NRC implemented a complete organizational restructuring which includes a new organizational and budgetary coding structure.

Solution

MIL assisted the FAIMIS project team with conversion design, validation, and data clean up. MIL provided alternative solutions for budgetary conversions that were more in line with NRC’s requirements. Further assistance was also provided to the NRC through data clean up and with data crosswalks. The NRC planed to implement a change to their organizational structure along with the implementation of Momentum. To facilitate this, MIL created crosswalks that will allow the programmers to easily map from the old codes to the new codes. These crosswalks were also used by the end-users in learning the new code structures. Finally, the crosswalks were used by the data conversion team to map the codes on the documents to be converted to the new codes as well as to validate the conversions. NRC also standardized its vendor codes by changing the codes to map to the DUNS numbers. MIL assisted NRC with this conversion process and provided validation and oversight to the conversion.

As the Independent Validation and Verification contractor, MIL provides oversight to the integrator’s contractual obligations and provides expert testing of the Momentum software. MIL also performs periodic reviews of the National Business Center’s (NBC) work to ensure that it abides by the requirements of the Statement of Work and maps to the NBC proposal. Further, MIL took the lead in developing the risk tracking methodology when the project was lacking risk tracking. MIL developed the initial risk register with the project risks. Most importantly, MIL performed detailed end-to-end testing of the LFB software and the cost accounting software. When working with the LFB software, MIL tested numerous interfaces, on-line transaction processing, complex invoice creation processes, and reviewed and verified the LFB conversion processes. While working with the cost accounting software, MIL tested and reviewed the cost accounting routines to ensure they worked as designed and tested the cost accounting and payroll interfaces.

Benefit

Due to MIL’s commitment to this project, the NRC was able to implement on time and within budget. During the project, MIL found over 100 issues with the custom LFB and cost accounting modules—the integrator had to fix these issues prior to deploying the software. During the software conversion process, MIL found several issues that led the integrator to fix the conversion programs and re-run the conversion before deploying the converted data. This catch prevented major issues with production data being incorrect. 

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