SCIENCE

U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has deployed Oracle Business Intelligence, Oracle Financials, Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Resources, Oracle Portal, Oracle WebCenter Suite, Oracle Beehive and Oracle’s Primavera Enterprise Project Portfolio Management applications to build a reporting system to manage agency-wide systems and data.

After it received American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funding that doubled its annual budget from $26 billion to almost $44 billion, DOE needed a comprehensive system to help manage the additional funding as well as provide accurate, timely reports on funding allocation and usage to both the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the public in near real-time, through recovery.gov and the DOE’s own recovery funds portal.  

To meet OMB’s requirement for near real-time access to how DOE is spending its ARRA funding, the agency integrated its financial, budgetary, procurement, personnel, program and performance information into a reporting system.  Oracle Warehouse Builder supports the system at the core, linking common data elements from each of the department’s business systems and supporting both external and internal reporting. With the initial goal of securing 800 users on Oracle Financials, DOE has grown its user community to more than 1,700 users in less than one year, and is experiencing a growth of about 100 new users per month.

DOE uses its core systems to provide the basic information for ARRA reports and can use Oracle Business Intelligence to easily make minor modifications to address new reporting requirements. With Oracle, DOE can now deliver financial reports to OMB on a daily, instead of weekly, basis. The Oracle software also provides automatic e-mail alerts to DOE staff when financial figures are not falling within expected ranges, so the agency can address budget allocation issues more proactively. The portal also enables users to create their own financial and project reports to meet their specific needs.

In addition, DOE’s budget and procurement offices can now use Oracle Application Express (APEX) to work more easily with various program offices by connecting an easy-to-use Web form or spreadsheet with Oracle Database to pull required data directly from corporate systems.

DOE has also deployed Oracle WebCenter Suite and Oracle Beehive to integrate enterprise 2.0 capabilities into its business processes. The solutions provide DOE with an integrated set of modular collaboration services including calendar, team workspaces, instant messaging and conferencing. Since the go-live in January, almost two-thirds of the human resources department now uses the instant messaging capability. Additionally, DOE has been able to conduct training via Web conferencing, ultimately reducing travel expenses.

Further, DOE deployed Oracle's Sun hardware at its leading research labs such as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories and Tennessee Valley Authority.

Sandia National Laboratories uses Sun technology as the foundation for Sandia’s Red Sky supercomputer, which provides computing might for a variety of Sandia projects and is instrumental in supporting efforts to solve the nation’s pressing energy challenges. The Sun technology provides Sandia with a 10-fold increase in computational capability, as Red Sky is one of world’s 10 fastest computers. Further, Oracle’s Sun enables super-configuration, achieving a peak performance of more than 500 trillion mathematical operations per second.

Supporting Quote

“Federal agencies that received ARRA funding – like DOE – need a solution that helps to better manage and report on the imminent increase in data. Oracle provides agencies with a flexible, robust and easy-to-use reporting and analysis system to facilitate management of that influx in information,” said Mark Johnson, senior vice president, Oracle Public Sector.