The Challenge.

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The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) links U.S. agriculture to the world to enhance export opportunities and global food security. The FAS works in partnership with the U.S. food and agricultural industry to help exporters develop and maintain global markets for hundreds of products in addition to supporting agricultural exporters through export credit guarantee programs. 

The existing systems being used by the FAS lacked necessary checks and balances with grant administrative requirements and were not compliant with federal grant management statutes and policies as introduced to legislation through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in (2009) and creation of the Government Accountability and Transparency Board (GATB) in 2011. These overarching inefficiencies also resulted in a large amount of unliquidated obligations, of which the top 5 out of 249 accounted for $12.9 Million according to findings by the Office of the Inspector General. 

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The Solution.

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The USDA FAS contracted with Genesis to leverage our Public Sector experience to focus on operational improvements in Federal financial management, budgeting, accounting, billing, and reporting which supports the Financial Management Modernization Initiative (FMMI). Through a full integration of SAP Grantor, Genesis and the FAS were able to consolidate three general ledger processes – FMMI, grants management, and cuff records – into one integrated solution within the SAP platform. 

By bringing all these systems together to a singular platform, the FAS will benefit from enhanced transparency and visibility to payment and reporting, facilitating reconciliation and easing closeouts. The single source solution brought forth with Genesis’ implementation of SAP Grantor will reduce operational and maintenance costs, development time and costs and licensing fees.

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The Results.

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Through their ongoing partnership with Genesis, the USDA FAS has been able to streamline organizational practices in order to operate more efficiently and economically while providing increased service levels to its stakeholders in the U.S. and abroad. Implementation of SAP Grantor and consolidation of GL processes has effectively reduced maintenance, operating and licensing costs across the department. Transitioning the grant process from antiquated and manually intensive procedures to an online platform which captures the entire life cycle has increased control of grants in addition to achieving necessary Segregation of Duties regulations required for full compliance.  This increased efficiency has enabled the FAS to realize better accuracy and timeliness of reporting as well as improved financial visibility and enhanced analytics. Furthermore, the FAS continues to witness improvements in internal and external customer service plus marked advancement in compliance with the Prompt Payment Act.