Defense Acquisition University
As the Department of Defense (DoD)’s corporate university for acquisition education, the Defense Acquisition University (DAU) provides mandatory, assignment-specific and continuing education courses for military and civilian acquisition personnel. The mission of the DAU is to provide practitioner training and services to enable the DoD’s Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics (AT&L) community to make smart business decisions and deliver timely and affordable capabilities to the war fighter. The AT&L workforce consists of over 126,000 Department of Army, Department of Navy, Department of Air Force and Defense agency professionals serving in 13 acquisition, technology, and logistics career fields.
Business Problem
DAU sought an improved IT solution for managing purchase and training requests. It required a web-based, simple-to-use system that would be essentially transparent to personnel making requests, with features like single sign-on through integration into the DAU’s Active Directory service. It also required that the system be easy to administer, with flexible reporting capabilities to automate the manual work done by finance and buyer personnel to track spending.
Appian Solution
By leveraging Appian for its Micro-Purchase Management System, the DAU now provides a web-based environment to enforce processes and increase efficiency, reliability, and visibility. The Micro-Purchase Management System processes hundreds of requisitions and ensures that business rules and approvals are met in every instance. The system reduces requisition processing time, utilizes web forms to eliminate repetitive data entry, delivers reports that can be used to identify process bottlenecks, and enables the generation of other reports providing DAU management with vital data and statistics about micro-purchase training requisition trends. Perhaps most importantly, the consistency of reporting that Appian delivers is a huge benefit, ensuring that reporting data is accurate, which enables less time and effort on data validation and cleansing, and more focus on strategic business issues.
