FedSoft worked closely with the Financial Operations Division at the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) to build an interface between their legacy grants management system and the USDA’s financial management system (SAP). Over the course of 6 months, FedSoft organized a stakeholder and subject matter expert group, conducted a series of analytical tasks using a variety of analysis and requirements gathering methods to develop a full picture of NIFA’s needs finally designing and developing the Financial Processing Application (FPA) based on these requirements. During this period NIFA was also transitioning from using the DHHS Payment Management System (PMS) to the Treasury’s Automated Standard Application for Payments (ASAP) for purposes of making grant payments. The requirement to integrate NIFA’s legacy grants management system simultaneously with USDA’s accounting system and Treasury’s payment management system was an extremely complex and challenging development and integration project.
It was necessary to achieve integration without negatively impacting NIFA’s grants customers through disruption in service due to loss of data or unavailability of systems. FedSoft accomplished this task by October 1, 2011, just in time for the beginning of FY2012. The first transmission, which was half of NIFA’s 2011 grant data had a 91% success rate with only 9% of the data requiring manual correction. Two months later, after NIFA corrected the initial 9% of problem data, the other half of the data was transmitted with a 100% success rate. This amounted to more than 40,000 transactions and $1.34 billion in successful postings. NIFA continues to rely on FPA as a mission critical component between its grants and financial systems.