CASE STUDY: U.S. AIR NATIONAL GUARD

The Air National Guard (ANG) Personnel Appropriation (budget: $3.5 billion; strength/personnel: over 106,127) provides resources necessary to compensate military personnel required to man approved force structure and support infrastructure.

To improve the precision of the Air National Guard’s Military Personnel portion of the President’s Budget Submission to Congress, the ANG Financial Management leadership needed to revise their processes, methodologies, and systems for preparing the ANG’s part of the President’s Budget submission.

The President’s Budget is a budget for future years. In order to better forecast the future, it is necessary to be able to track the past and identify trends and changes to financial requirements to date. For the ANG, the problem was that the historical and execution manpower data was in many individual, large-scale systems. While a few of the systems shared data, no single system shared all of the data. An identifiable trend in any one of these systems could have a significant impact on the financial needs of the ANG in the President’s budget.
In addition to incidents caused by lack of access to the appropriate financial data, spreadsheet-supported and manual processes were causing calculation errors and major process inefficiencies, budget cycle times would last multiple weeks and require significant overtime.

The ANG contracted Neubrain to build an integrated planning and business analytics system (J-Book system) to provide accurate President’s Budget Submission and balance resources in the most cost-effective manner and at the same time avoid violations of the US Anti-Deficiency Act.