The Industry Advisory Council's (IAC) eGov Shared Interest Group (SIG), in partnership with E-Gov and the Federal CIO Council, today announced the Federal agency programs selected as the "Top 5" within the Excellence.Gov awards program. These prestigious programs were selected from a group of 25 program finalists for demonstrating excellence in E-Government innovation.
Winners were presented their awards at a ceremony and reception on February 12 in conjunction with the E-Gov Web-Enabled Government Conference in Washington, D.C. A panel of judges comprised of representatives from government and industry considered the following requirements when selecting the "Top 5" finalists from more than 100 entries:
- Extent of the project's impact
- How the project saved resources or increased productivity
- Involvement of other agencies or levels of government
- Repeatability for other government agencies
Two U.S. Postal Service projects were among the 25 finalists, eTravel and eFleetCard. eFleetCard was then selected as one of "Top 5" Excellence.Gov award winners. This is a significant achievement and honor for USPS and Johnston McLamb is pleased to be the Postal Service's development partner for both of these projects.
The eFleetCard system is a web application that helps USPS manage the costs of operating a fleet of over 220,000 vehicles. Each vehicle has its own assigned Voyager credit card used to purchase fuel, oil, repairs, and other necessary products and services for the vehicle. Each week, Voyager transmits details of all USPS credit card transactions to the eFleetCard system, which loads the transactions into an Oracle database. Then authorized users, ranging from postmasters at 17,000 post offices, managers at 300 vehicle maintenance facilities throughout the U.S. states and territories, and senior managers at U.S.P.S. Headquarters in Washington, D.C., can view the transactions over the USPS intranet using only a web browser.
Since inception, the Postal Service has realized over $26 million in savings because the eFleetCard system enables USPS to either recover or avoid unnecessary payment of many state excise, state sales, and local taxes that are charged on fuel at the pump but for which USPS is exempt. Prior to the eFleetCard system, USPS was not able to take advantage of any of these savings.
The eFleetCard system also automatically detects possible audit situations by analyzing individual transactions and purchasing patterns for 17 different types of potential problems. Through both detection and deterrence, this capability prevents fraud and abuse, and will immediately identify suspicious activity so that USPS can quickly implement corrective action.
eTravel is an automated, web-based system of 80,000 USPS users to process travel expense reports. To date, eTravel has been used to process more than 286,000 expense reports totaling more than $142,000,000. This system automates the entire life cycle of travel expenses: from entry of travel expenses through payment. Additionally, the system automatically performs many calculations, including mileage charges, per diem expenses, and trip totals, eliminating the math errors that were frequent before eTravel existed.
Benefits of eTravel include:
- Fewer people are required to review travel reports and associated receipts. Previously this process involved approximately 90 individuals part-time. Now only 3 full time employees handle this function.
- The USPS credit card payment delinquency rate has been reduced from approximately 5% to 2% for 40,000 cardholders.
- Time to pay out of pocket and credit card expenses is now three days from report approval.
- Delays caused by lost or temporarily misplaced paper expense reports have been eliminated.
- Travelers no longer have to find the latest version of GSA per diem rates in the Postal Bulletin to complete the manual calculation of per diem, because both the GSA Domestic and State Department International per diem rates are maintained in the system.