OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: February 22, 2000

Stephanie Hanna (O) 202/208-6416

DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR CELEBRATES
COMPLETION OF "IDEAS" IMPLEMENTATION

With the end of Fiscal Year 1999, the Department of the Interior's Office of Acquisition and Property Management and the National Business Center (NBC) along with Interior's bureaus and offices celebrated the completion of their efforts to implement the Interior Department Electronic Acquisition System (IDEAS). This milestone represents the conclusion of a long effort to streamline the procurement process in an efficient and cost effective manner.

IDEAS automates the entire acquisition process, including requisitioning, purchasing and contracting and is integrated with the Department's Federal Financial System. The IDEAS implementation provides for Departmental savings by eliminating the need to rekey documents and eliminates time in sending documents from one individual/office to another for approval and processing. It improves accountability and is the foundation for resolving a Department-wide material weakness in procurement data reporting.

To date, IDEAS has been installed at 361 sites including all major and many smaller acquisition offices of the Department. The current IDEAS baseline software was competitively acquired in early 1997 from American Management Systems, and meets the primary objective of Departmentwide standardization, and integration towards a paperless process. A web-based electronic commerce module was developed by the NBC, which has continued to keep the Department of the Interior as a leader in electronic commerce. The current system represents an investment of over $4 million and thousands of staff-hours to test, implement and train users on the software. The implementation of this streamlined system has enabled the drastically reduced procurement workforce (down 27% since FY 1993) to continue to perform its vital function in support of Interior's missions.

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