OAKS

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Business Areas

A primary OAKS objective is to integrate the state's central administrative functions for greater efficiency and reliability. There are five general business areas within this integrated system: capital improvements, financials, asset management, human capital management and procurement. Brief descriptions of each functional area and representative business benefits follow.

Capital Improvements - The OAKS capital improvements module will allow state agencies and institutions of higher education to manage design and construction, track schedules, and store documentation for capital construction projects, submit vendor payments electronically, electronically complete contractual forms and use a workflow approval process for several documents.

Benefits:
	Enhanced tracking of project schedules: OAKS will enhance real-time tracking of project schedules with update adjustments being entered at remote or central locations. The availability of milestone completion, on-time delivery rates, and comments on commodity or service quality will be accessible through an easy-to-use interface.
	Enhanced tracking of vendor performance: All state agencies and institutions will have access to and will share the OAKS integrated database. This capability will allow better tracking of vendor performance to promote selection of more responsible vendors.

Financials - The OAKS financials module will enable the functions currently performed with the Central Accounting System. These include budget preparation, grants management, financial reporting, appropriation control, revenue tracking, vendor maintenance, encumbering, and spending.

Benefits:
	Increased savings from vendor discounts: OAKS will streamline the accounts payable process and will reduce the current 21-step, 28-day process to an estimated five steps over 10 days. These reductions will allow the state to take advantage of vendor discount programs to help save an estimated $26 million over a five-year period.
	Dramatic reduction in manual processing regarding previously authorized vendor payments: OAKS will enable the state to use best practice vendor payment processes such as evaluated receipt settlement and automatic invoice matching to help save an estimated $8.7 million over a five-year period.
	Significant decrease in warrant writing expenditures: By consolidating payments across agencies, OAKS will help the state eliminate more than 250,000 warrants per year, decreasing related expenditures by more than $3 million over a five-year period.

Asset Management - The OAKS asset management module will enable users to maintain state property inventory for stewardship and financial reporting purposes.

Benefits:
	Dramatic reductions in amount of time needed to record new asset: The procurement process for assets is not currently integrated with asset tracking functions statewide. With OAKS, procurement transactions will capture necessary asset information that will significantly reduce research and manual data entry time. This capability will help save approximately $4.5 million over a five-year period.
	Use of bar coding technologies to reduce time needed to conduct physical inventories: OAKS will promote the use of bar coding technologies to reduce by several minutes the amount of time needed to inventory each of the state's estimated 1.8 million assets. This capability will help save nearly $11.5 million over a five-year period.

Human Capital Management - The OAKS Human Capital Management System will provide electronic processes for state agencies to manage recruitment, testing, hiring, training, payroll, benefits administration and other major HR functions. Additionally, agencies will be able to produce customized reports on-line and download data. Self-service functions will allow employees to access payroll information and perform tasks such as election of benefits during open enrollment.

Benefits:
	Reductions in expenditures related to absence claims management: OAKS will facilitate processing for injury, disability, and workers' compensation transactions. OAKS will track employee claims and help identify follow-up action resulting in an estimated $41 million in savings over a five-year period.
	Dramatic reductions in data entry time: For example the state currently processes more than 60,000 personnel actions (PA) each year. Using improved workflow procedures OAKS could help reduce by 75% the amount of time needed to complete each PA and save an estimated $8.5 million over a five-year period.

Procurement - The OAKS procurement module will offer end-to-end e-procurement capability to enable self-service, manage purchasing processes, and integrate all procurement functionality from vendor registration and bid preparation to the shopping, ordering, and invoice matching functions.

Benefits:
	Leverage volume discount purchasing power: Agencies currently use their direct purchasing authority to spend approximately $400 million per year on commodities and services for which a statewide contract may exist. With hundreds of different state contracts, it is often difficult to locate a desired item. OAKS will help track purchasing trends and will allow procurement managers to better focus their policy and monitoring efforts. OAKS functionality will help the state conservatively save $45 million over a five-year period.
	Significant decrease in expenditures related to creating purchase orders: OAKS will streamline the processes used in creating, approving and mailing a purchase order to the vendor. User profile data will automatically pre-populate vendor, contract and other transaction information. OAKS workflow capability will further reduce approval times. These capabilities will help the state save an estimated $4.1 million over a five-year period.