The United States Air Force Digitally Transforms Financial Processes Across 140 Bases

Like many large and distributed organizations, the U.S. Air Force used to physically mail paper payroll and travel documents between bases – a slow, expensive process susceptible to loss and difficult to track. The Air Force engaged Kofax to establish an information capture platform that could support the digitization and management of payroll and travel information, and easily expand to accommodate other document capture requirements.

The Air Force engaged Kofax to establish an extensible information capture service that could accommodate digitizing and transporting payroll and travel information and easily expand to accommodate other Air Force document capture requirements.

Using Kofax technology, the department successfully deployed a distributed capture solution across 140 Air Force bases around the world.

The solution utilizes Kofax Capture, the world’s leading automated information capture platform, and VRS Elite, the recognized industry standard for capture productivity and quality throughout a document’s lifecycle. Kofax Capture provides scan-to-archive capabilities by scanning documents and forms to create digital images, extracting index data for retrieval purposes and delivering the images and associated data to a variety of repositories and applications. This can significantly reduce retrieval costs while improving regulatory and compliance efforts. Kofax VRS Elite reduces the time involved in manual document preparation and enhances the quality of scanned images, dramatically improving both manual scanning productivity and the efficiency of document capture processes. High quality images are critical as they can significantly impact the success of downstream data extraction and retrieval needs.

The solution remotely processes service member financial transactions and securely transmits the information to the Air Force Enterprise Information Management System (EIM). The expanded capabilities are known as the EIM DocIngest Service. The Kofax deployment supports the U.S. Air Force Financial Services Transformation (FST) initiative, a joint effort run by the Secretary of the Air Force (SAF) Financial Management Transformation (FMT) and Financial Management Operations and Technology (FMPT) organizations. FST delivers efficiencies of financial operations in through consolidation of currently distributed duplicative processing.

Department of Defense and Air Force security requirements are stringent. Kofax technical staff worked closely with the GCSS-AF Security Program Office and the Air Force Financial Management Transformation project team to deliver a remote document capture architecture that met the technical and security requirements of GCSS-AF. GCSS-AF mandated that document scanning application authentication needed to support x.509 DoD Identity Certificates. Kofax Capture support of x.509 digital certificates ensures Air Force data transmissions are authenticated and secure.

The EIM DocIngest system architecture has reduced costs and enabled the Air Force to meet new requirements quickly and efficiently.

The first utilization of the EIM DocIngest service was remotely scanning financial transactions such as MilPay changes and TDY Travel Vouchers. Digitization (scanning) of these documents required a solution capable of rendering highly legible images with an optimized file size. The tight integration Kofax Capture with VRS enabled poor quality images to be flagged and separately processed to obtain the highest quality image.

Kofax was able to leverage open systems IT standards to create a high availability (HA) environment. The primary supported HA technology used was Microsoft Cluster Services (MSCS). MSCS provides both HA database and file services to Kofax Capture Network Server. The second HA technology is Microsoft Network Load Balancing (Microsoft NLB) for the Web services tier. The solution runs multiple instances of its modules on multiple servers. The Kofax batch manager ensures that any batches running on a server when it fails, are re-directed to a running server to be completed.

The Air Force’s financial management operations have been substantially improved as direct result of the implementation of Kofax for their global and enterprise capture needs. Both timeliness and level of service have been improved while preserving or increasing the accuracy of the content extracted from the input management process – while operating in accordance with the Air Force’s strict security standards.