Team members from the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) have developed an app that streamlines the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Vicksburg District (MVK) maintenance data collection process. The app provides an efficient way to submit daily reports to a repository, helping to track vital financial data.
“The MVK Maintenance Section Application was designed to help field supervisors report their daily costs to the administrators and analysts back at the office,” said Matthew Sanders, an ITL computer scientist. “Previously, this was done by filling out PDF forms and emailing them to various analysts. At that point, the analysts would transcribe the data to an array of spreadsheets for processing, introducing many touch points for accidental errors.”
The application aims to centralize the whole process by providing each role with a user interface specialized to their needs. Field supervisors can fill out their daily reports and make edits as needed, and analysts have dashboards that automate post processing. This eliminates the potential for duplicates and lost reports, as well as the requirement for many steps before a final product is reached. Report aggregation and processing is also automated so cost analyses can be provided on demand.
When beginning the process of developing this technology, SEEB team members drew from their years of experience creating data collection and reporting systems. At the core of those systems is the Mobile Information Collection Application (MICA), an ITL-developed application for quickly and efficiently collecting and managing field data that has already been used in many emergency response efforts and for reporting critical safety information and military installations around the globe.
“We knew from the beginning that we wanted to leverage MICA for this application, as it was a good fit for the MVK’s needs,” said Sanders. “This also allowed us to reduce our development time, lowering costs and resulting in a much faster final solution. Our MICA users also collectively benefit from improvements made to the core system.”
By replacing the manual process typically used to record and report maintenance costs, the MVK Maintenance Section Application ultimately reduces the time spent submitting daily cost reports, increases reliability of submitted information and drastically decreases time managing and processing by hand. It also streamlines report submission, stores reports in a central location and automates processing. Future versions of the web application will involve a mobile application for offline report collection and automated access to financial data.
“We’re currently discussing phase two of the MVK Maintenance Section Application, where we introduce more workflows, refine existing ones, and hopefully add more automation,” said Sanders.