Improvement Effort For Efficiency

The United States Forest Service’s (USFS) Environmental Analysis and Decision Making (EADM) led an improvement effort to establish more efficiency of its limited resources while identifying activities of marginal value. The complexities of geographic variations, combined with the inertia of a highly federated bureaucracy, impose numerous challenges to the basic understanding of costs of reporting let alone optimization. Consequently, Xentity proposed an effective methodology that will provide the USFS the capacity to extend Natural Resource Management (NRM) Reporting analysis beyond the pilot stage to an enterprise scale as needed.

Proposed Methodology to Solve Inherent Inefficiencies

The USFS had come to realize there are some inherent inefficiencies within the NRM Reporting system. This made it costly to maintain and support. They wanted to ensure existing resources and capabilities were valuable to the user community. At the same time, they also wanted to identify more cost effective approaches to processing and sharing the information. The USFS is a complex, highly federated organization. One that imposes significant communications challenges on needs and requirements management of the NRM Report user community. This is where Xentity’s proposed methodology comes into the picture.

The proposed method identified opportunities to free up field resources from collecting data of limited value to themselves or the Washington Office (WO), processing data unnecessarily, or generating reports via complex or dated technologies. The method provided traceability from collection through to intended use. Also, it collected the required information to identify data reuse potential, process inefficiencies, technical obsolescence or inflexibility and potentially new reporting requirements resulting from the analysis. Furthermore, the plan was this method’s output to be a series of actionable recommendations. This includes the opportunity costs of discontinuing or altering the report are clearly established. Also, the means for a future reengineering path are established. They planned to store the data in related tables, then map them into the USFS Mega architecture model.

Developed a Detailed Work Plan to Maintain NRM Reports

Xentity’s methodology helped develop a working relationship and detailed work plan for the entire project. They developed and implemented techniques to obtain detailed information about each report, including business requirements and workflows. They produced a summary evaluation detailing the factors affecting the efficiency of the reporting process. This evaluation will also provide a summary-level, ‘as-is’ description showing how the selected subset of reports interrelate. And they provided a set of recommendations detailing what aspects of the two previously mentioned points were most important. Most importantly, this method allows the USFS to maintain the NRM Reports in a less costly and more efficient manner. Consequently improving their own processes.