The U.S. government awards billions of dollars in contracts and grants each year. This is big business. In order to provide the critical business intelligence and situational awareness needed to maximize efficiencies, the traditional silo approach will not work. An integrated contract/grant management system is required.
Karthik Consulting, LLC (KC) designed, developed and currently manages a best-in-class contract/grant (Award) management system that integrates processes and data from multiple systems to create a complete picture for each functional area involved in contract and grant administration. The system that KC developed for the US Navy, Office of Naval Research (ONR), Contract Administration Management Information System (CAMIS), provides 360 degree visibility into all aspects of the management ecosystem in near real time, including management of contracts and grants, documents, financials, performers, and payments while providing meaningful reports and metrics.
CAMIS is designated as an official Defense Business System (DBS). As such, it complies with the Department of Defense (DOD) Information Technology (IT) and Information Assurance (IA) requirements and has the Authority-to-Operate (ATO) on the DOD network. The three critical elements of a post award contract and grant management system are: Award Management, Financial Management and Document Management. The sheer size and impressive functionality of the KC contract/grant management approach, as deployed for ONR, is outlined below:
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Award Management: This module maintains the contract and grant, including its change history, period of performance, source of funding, and type of award. It provides a closeout checklist and tracks the Contract Data Requirements List (CDRL).
Financial Management: This module tracks obligations and expenditures at the Contract Line item (CLIN), Sub-Line item (SLIN), and Accounting Classification Reference Number (ACRN) level. It tracks over and under burn and expenditure rates. Additionally, it tracks No Funds Extension (NFE) and dormant obligation issues. It has an Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) based interface with the Navy Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system for tracking financial transactions.
Document Management: This module tracks over 200+ types of acquisition documents with custom workflows. Additionally it automatically tags each document with metadata and interfaces with the DOD’s official acquisition document repository, Electronic Document Access (EDA). Over 5 million documents are maintained in the OpenText LiveLink based document management system.
In addition, KC’s approach unifies managing Performers, Payments and Reporting/Metrics into an integrated suite.
Performer Management: This module maintains the various types of point of contact (POC) such as: Principal Investigator (PI), Accounting, Finance, Legal, and Security, for each Performer and agency departments. Users have the ability to search by various criteria.
Payment Management: This module maintains the voucher history, manages invoices and tracks payment information. It has direct interfaces with Defense Finance and Accounting Services (DFAS) Wide Area Work Flow (WAWF) using EDI and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) formats to track Cost Vouchers, Grant Vouchers, and Non Procurement Instrument (NPI) submissions and approvals, and with MyInvoice for payments.
Reporting/Metrics: This module provides dozens of reports including expenditure rates, tracking staff workload, government property, and indirect costs. Additionally, metrics are tracked for number of vouchers processed, average voucher processing time, number of new or closed and active or expired contracts and grants.
KC provides an integrated approach that lets you understand all aspects of the contract/grant ecosystem. Whether you are from the program office, contracts or finance department, our system can help you quickly answer these types of questions for any contract or grant:
What is the period of performance?
What are the deliverables?
When will it run out of funds?
What funding and/or contract actions do I have to take to realign the money?
How many invoices are pending approval?
What is the average time for my agency to approve an invoice?
What is the funding source?
What is the color of money used?
Which contract or grant has expenditure problems?
What is the change history?
What is my acquisition staff workload?
What is my portfolio distribution (6.1, 6.2, 6.3, FNC, SBIR, STTR, URI, MURI, DURI …)?
How much government property was purchased?
Karthik Consulting’s approach provides the data and intelligence necessary to make smart business decisions ensuring Performers are executing according to contractual agreements, maximizing budget utilization and ensuring that business operations are running smoothly.
Size and Scope of the System
$10 Billion+ Portfolio
5 Million Documents
200+ Document Types
75,000+ Invoices Per Year
25,000+ Active Awards
1,000+ Performers