Page 12 - FCA Diamond Point Dec 2022

FROM THE FIELD

US Army Financial Management Command

(USAFMCOM) Corner
Course speeds financial reporting, analytics drive readiness
By Mark R. W. Orders-Woempner, USAFMCOM Public Affairs Officer

INDIANAPOLIS – Speed and accuracy, along with good old-fashioned money, are critical to building
the readiness and lethality the Army needs to match pace with near-peer adversaries, but nothing
can be as much of a consuming time-suck as building charts and slide decks – just ask any staff
NCO or officer.

Helping financial and resource managers leverage a modernized system to provide critical financial
data to commanders while dramatically cutting their time to build financial reports, the U.S. Army
Financial Management Command now offers an in-residence, 3-day class on SAP BI Business
Objects 4.3.

“This course teaches students to use BOBJ (Business Objects), as we call it, within the Army’s
General Fund Enterprise Business System to build out financial dashboards for their leadership in
a fraction of the time it took in the old Business Explorer, or BEx, system because the system
automatically generates them without needing to export data and manually create them,” said
Tiffany McCoy, USAFMCOM System Support Operations BOBJ course developer and lead
instructor.

In-residence BOBJ courses are currently offered twice-a-month at USAFMCOM. The course is free
for government employees. In all cases, units and organizations are responsible for funding
students’ travel costs.

“USAFMCOM’s SSO Business Intelligence Helpdesk has been encouraging users to use BOBJ
since 2017, but version 4.3 is completely redesigned and much more powerful,” McCoy said.
“Commanders come from a variety of backgrounds, like infantry and artillery, so they don’t always
have the experience to know what sub-activity groups within areas of responsibility are, but with
BOBJ, you can rename and group them together to show higher-level data in an easy-to-
understand way.

“Just like in your car, the dashboards created by BOBJ 4.3 give commanders an easy way to see
the problems, understand the root causes of those problems and figure out a way to solve them,”
she added.

While many commanders are already used to finance dashboards put together by their finance
professionals, those are manually generated, non-standardized and susceptible to human errors
via “fat fingering.”

“BOBJ is one of the best reporting tools that the Army’s implemented because it’s an all-in-one
system that provides more analytical and ad-hoc tools for building reports,” explained Rathelis
Dawkins, USAFMCOM SSO business intelligence analyst, who recently used BOBJ during her
tenure at U.S. Army Forces Command.

“Now, we are able to develop more professional reports with graphics and charts, create custom
dashboards, build new reports including custom variables, develop end-user interactive reports,
and add external data to queries,” Dawkins said.

With BEx, end users would have to export data from GFEBS into highly-complex spreadsheets with
thousands, if not millions, of lines of data, McCoy elaborated.

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