Rick Koebert
Associate Director, Federal Personnel Payroll Systems & Services
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Our six years as a vital part of the National Business Center (NBC) has been exciting! Employees’ pay is always a subject of the highest concern for any ongoing organization, and this is true for all of our clients. We have always put paying employees accurately and on time as our top priority, while balancing the many initiatives we have successfully pursued to improve federal pay and personnel systems and services. At the time of this article’s writing, we disburse every pay period approximately $423 million – or about $11 billion a year. |
The move of the Bureau of Reclamation’s Denver Administrative Service Center to the NBC was not scheduled for October 1998 when NBC stood up. Rather, our incorporation was delayed until April 1999, so that the reorganization would not interfere with our priority of completing the implementation of our then new Federal Personnel Payroll System (FPPS) in early FY 1999. Once transitioned to the NBC, we then immediately began moving out on plans to enhance our system, which had been in development for many years. Technology had changed during the development period; and while FPPS was an integrated personnel/pay database system with online capabilities, our clients wanted Web access and datamart enhancements added to our system. The FPPS 2000 project was developed and funded by our clients to make these enhancements. By 2001 this effort was successful.
Having the most modern personnel payroll system serving the federal sector and a great customer service ethic have positioned us to succeed in leading initiatives such as e-Pay. After a grueling competition, the NBC was selected to be one of the federal government’s final four e-Pay providers. This effort is reducing pay systems for the federal sector from over 26 to 4. During our first year of migrating e-Pay customers to the NBC, we have successfully migrated the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Surface Transportation Board and Saint Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation. The rest of DOT will follow in FY 2005.
Succeeding in the e-Gov arena has opened opportunities for us to take on additional initiatives: we now offer an employee-based, Web-accessible Time and Attendance system; we are working with OPM to host their e-Official Personnel Folder; we continue to develop a partnership with USDA’s National Finance Center; and we are preparing responses to hopefully align us to be selected under the Human Resource (HR) Line of Business. Under the last initiative, we would continue as a payroll provider and also continue with the core personnel functions we now provide, while adding more capabilities to meet other HR requirements. Since we are currently a shared service center meeting the defined core requirements, we believe that this effort will be a great opportunity for us and our existing and future customer base to share in additional savings of new systems opportunities.
All of this and much more has occurred under the leadership of our Director, Tim Vigotsky. With Tim’s vision and his total support for our staff’s efforts, we have succeeded in improving and consolidating operations, improving systems and services, and ultimately saving the federal government money. We are well positioned for the future; and consequently, NBC’s successes in partnership with our clients will continue.
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