Faster Budget Allocations

Within U.S. Army Forces Command, the process used to prioritize new operational requirements and assign funding to them was taking far too long. This impacted success in the Global War on Terrorism and needed correction. A LSS team was formed to analyze the current process and recommend ways to improve it. The team shortened the process by 53 percent, reduced error rates and provided clearer instructions for making submissions to the prioritized list thereby reducing duplicate submissions. The Command also saved $160,000 over its four-year budget cycle as a result of implementing the new process.

Problem

U.S. Army Forces Command (FORSCOM) trains, mobilizes, deploys, sustains, transforms, and reconstitutes conventional forces; thereby providing relevant and ready land power to Combatant Commanders worldwide.  This extensive mission includes mobilization and training of continental U.S. based resources (roughly 80% of the Army) at various locations.

One organization within FORSCOM, the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, Comptroller (commonly known as the G8) is responsible for finance and budget approvals.  The G8 works with organizations in the Command to prioritize operational requirements and assign funding to them.  The process used includes emerging (new) requirements validation, the prioritized list of these new requirements and the funding available for them.  With a focus on supporting the Global War on Terrorism with financial resources, the process of reviewing, approving and providing funding against requirements on the prioritized list was taking too much time.  This resulted in delays to apply funding against missions supporting operational requirements and created delays in successive processes.

Approach

To address this problem, a Lean Six Sigma (LSS) Black Belt team was formed from FORSCOM G8 personnel.  The team completed a Value Stream Map to capture the current process.  The team then used the Value Stream Map information to measure process cycle-time and complete a Value Add Analysis.  Initial review found that the process took an average of 103 days to complete for each requirement.  In addition to this, the team found that the process required excessive rework of information, and included review steps that had unclear measures of quality.  Also, there were no formal progress reports or tracking of requirements as they passed through the process.   The team found that an automation initiative had been started to improve the process, but was not completed.  The team identified key root causes of cycle time to address in development of an improved process.  These included lack of standardized measures of quality which resulted in rework; limited external knowledge of the process which resulted in high error rates and unclear instructions for submissions to the prioritized list which necessitated resubmissions.

The team established recommended quality expectations to ensure completeness and accuracy of requirements information on the list.  The team worked with other personnel to improve the requirements tracking system.  Automatically generated reminders were added to the system, and a list of formalized alternate subject matter experts was added to support the system and provide backup resources when needed.  Training procedures were updated and the process was reduced from six overall steps to five.

Results

After completion of this project, the average process time was reduced from 103 days to 48 days-- a 53 percent reduction.  The G8 realized $160,000 cost reduction across the four-year budget cycle.  External stakeholders of the process and “customers” saw reductions in waiting time and rework of information which provided benefits to them in the form of reduced errors.  A new automated feedback/status reporting capability reduced error rates and duplicate requirements submissions.