New system requires patience from DPW customers

By Reginald Rogers
Paraglide

On April 1, Fort Bragg launched the new Army-mandated General Fund Enterprise Business System, as a means of assisting its many agencies in planning, managing and collecting their annual operating costs. GFEBS is supposed to standardize, streamline and share critical data across the active Army, the Army National Guard and the Army Reserve, according to the GFEBS website.

But customers of Fort Bragg’s Directorate of Public Works have voiced displeasure with the new system.

Many of those complaints stem from the customers’ inability to track any work requesting (service orders and work orders) that have been placed through DPW.

In the past and under the old system, these customer were able to go online and see the status of any outstanding service order. Now according to many, the GFEBS system is not as user-friendly.

“GFEBS is supposed to help us be able to do a better job collecting our cost and it isn’t specific for the DPW,” explained Christine Hull, DPW’s acting chief of Operations and Maintenance Division, whose office tracks the GFEBS service orders. “All military units in the Army garrison use it because it is a cost collection and resource management tool.”

She said one module of the GFEBS system is to track spending and how the DPW processes work to take care of real property. “We spend a lot of money maintaining, restoring and repairing these facilities every year,” Hull said. “When service orders are actually called in, we actually take the work in that new system, GFEBS, so that we’re able to collect all of the costs.”

She explained how the system worked, saying that for example, in Building 2-1105, if a plumber works on it, along with an heating, ventilation and air conditioning mechanic and an electrician, through GFEBS, DPW will be able to see how much money has been spent maintaining that building annually.

“Over the course of a year, we can see how much money we’re spending to maintain that building to decide at what point we need to make some major repairs or renovations, or if it’s more cost-effective to continue to make repairs,” Hull said.

She also explained that DPW’s previous service order system, the Integrated Facilities System, allowed its DPW employees to track all of its real property, but it also allowed them to extract real time data and manipulate that data to a web-based file. This allowed the customers to access a DPW internal website to see the status of any service orders they may have called in.
“So, if you were a customer in Building 2-1120 and you wanted to know the status of your service order for an air conditioner, as long as you had your work order or service number order, you could look it up on the website and see that it was in supply because they had to order a part and here’s the name of the person who was working on it,” explained Greg Bean, DPW director.

Bean pointed out that the process for viewing service orders has changed and he acknowledged that Fort Bragg DPW has a very sophisticated customer base that likes to be kept informed.
Hull said customers are upset about simple capabilities that were featured in the IFS and web-based systems that are no longer available on the GFEBS system.

“From a customer’s perspective, in the older system, customers had a five-digit service order number, now they have a 12-digit number in GFEBS. Six of which are zeroes,” she pointed out. “But you have to know what the first number is and what the last five are in order to track work orders now. (GFEBS) is not helping us help ourselves.

“I think it’s the customer perspective that they’re feeling blind in not being able to see the status of their work orders. It has to feel different to them,” Hull continued. “They feel like the standard service has gone down, from their perspective.”

Bean said it’s important that customers practice patience as they get used to the GFEBS system.
“I would ask them to be patient,” he said. “I understand that they feel like they’re flying blind right now, but if they’ve called in a service order and they’ve written down the number, the service order clerk should have given them a priority.”

DPW customers should also remember that a Priority 1 work order requires that it be completed within 24 hours. Priority 2 and Priority 3 work orders should be completed within seven days and 30 days, respectively.