HEIDELBERG, Germany -- On April 1, resource management officials flipped the switch on a web-based financial, asset and accounting management system culminating more than a year of preparation at U.S. Army garrisons across Europe.
The financial management system, called General Fund Enterprise Business System or GFEBS, is expected to replace more than 80 legacy computer systems in use over the last several decades.
"Personnel have been training for this day for many months," said Cynthia Arnold, Installation Management Command Europe, chief of Resource Management Division. "Although faced with various challenges in completing the training, the GFEBS users overcame the obstacles to ensure there were no show stoppers for this deployment."
The April 1 launch was the fifth wave of GFEBS, which included all U.S. Army units in Europe and some locations in Korea. Three more launches are planned to complete the Army-wide launch of GFEBS.
The system is set to change several areas of Army budgeting, purchasing, finance and fiscal management. GFEBS will allow the Army to share information in real time and reveal what is driving costs. It will provide decision support information to sustain Army warfighting capability, provide analytic data and tools to support the Army enterprise, reduce the cost of business operations, and improve accountability and stewardship.
Employees from across the Army, not just resource management and accounting users, are included in GFEBS. Some of the business process areas that users will be able to capitalize on include funds management; property, plant and equipment; reimbursables; financials; cost management; and the spending chain.
In addition to their daily workload, garrisons were faced with completing numerous complex, labor-intensive tasks including assigning GFEBS user roles, completing training for approximately 2,000 IMCOM Europe employees, collecting data, and configuring and establishing a new account structure design. The tasks were compounded by the difficult challenge of understanding the new GFEBS concepts, terminology and practices that had to be mastered during the pre-deployment phase.
"GFEBS is critical to the future of a cost effective Army," said Diane Devens, IMCOM Europe, region director. "It will not only eliminate 87 of the Army's legacy financial systems and enable the creation of auditable financial statements; but will also place real time, high quality cost data in the hands of decision makers, empowering them to make prudent financial choices like never before."
"Nothing worth doing is easy, and I laud the Herculean efforts of our garrison leaders to master a challenging new system under a compressed deadline," she continued. "The effort is worth the payoff and we all win with GFEBS...for garrisons it empowers our leaders, for the American taxpayer it realizes our pledge, and for the Army it creates a modernized enterprise business system that allows us to focus on what we do best, taking care of Soldiers and their Families."
Full functionality of the system will occur in phases for Europe. Phase I includes processing of transactions involving U.S. dollars. The next phase, which begins July 1, will incorporate foreign currency and German local national employee pay.
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