The Air Force on Sept. 23 announced the award of a $73 million contract to Accenture Federal Services to complete work on the service's critical financial management system, the Defense Enterprise Accounting and Management System (DEAMS).
Accenture will be supporting the final phases of the multibillion-dollar DEAMS, the Air Force's enterprise resource planning (ERP) program that has been in development since 2003. When complete — expected in the next 30 months, per an Accenture release — it will be employed at every Air Force base in the world.
"DEAMS is designed to give the U.S. Air Force a 21st century financial management system that will provide accurate, reliable and timely business information to support more effective decision-making," Joe Chenelle, who leads Accenture's U.S. defense and intelligence work, said in the release.
According to the release, DEAMS streamlines cost accounting, purchase requests, accounts payable, financial obligations, and collections and customer billing, giving the Air Force more timely, accurate and relevant financial data and helping the service achieve auditability.
DEAMS' completion comes after years of struggles throughout the Defense Department to implement ERPs that efficiently handle the Pentagon's back-end business functions. Several high-profile programs across the services have come under criticism or even been canceled for cost overruns, missed deadlines and poor functionality. The Air Force's own $1 billion Expeditionary Combat Support System (ECSS) was canceled in 2012.
In a March interview with C4ISR & Networks, Carl Shofner, program executive officer for business and enterprise systems (BES) and director of the BES directorate at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, emphasized DEAMS' importance to Air Force operations.
"DEAMS is revolutionizing the way we're going to do pay and handle finances for the Air Force," Shofner said. "We've made tremendous progress…we've learned some key things in life after ECSS."
