The Challenge

The GSA IAE program determined that modernization was essential to improving the UI/UX of users and decreasing program costs. The program faced a myriad of challenges with modernizing its beta.SAM.gov website. The most significant challenge was retiring the legacy Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) reports module. It involved migrating FPDS.gov reports that thousands of public and agency users leveraged from one reporting tool to another reporting platform. Both tools were Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) products with their own proprietary schema and data storage elements. REI’s decades of experience in modernization programs allowed the team to address the critical challenges

Solution

REI developed a Reports Migration Automation Framework (RMAF) to solve the modernization and migration challenges faced by GSA IAE. The RMAF uses Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to automatically migrate large numbers of ad-hoc reports from one COTS product to another. RMAF calls upon the products’ user interfaces to perform the export and import tasks. This exponentially increased the migration speed, compared to conducting the migration manually. RMAF provided a disruptive capability that overcame the COTS product lock-in without breaking the software license policies. It provided substantial cost savings in development time and O&M while allowing agency leaders to leverage other modernized reporting products faster without legacy products’ constraints.

Citizen Impact

• • Saved hours of manual steps for public users
  • Increased public and media’s trust/confidence in beta.SAM.gov
  • Reduced burden on public users during the transition of FPDS reports to beta.SAM.gov DataBank

Agency Impact

• • RMAF automated the once manual actions required to create 15,000+ ad-hoc reports by 2,500 government and public users
  • Created cost avoidance for the development team
  • RMAF directly aligned with the President’s Management Agenda – (CAP Goal 6)
  • Provided an easy transition to modernized tools, which reduced the burden on the acquisition workforce, and oversight bodies
  • RMAF successfully migrated 98% of the ad-hoc reports regularly used by government and public users
  • Provided seamless analytics and data transparency supporting (CAP Goal 2) during the modernization