Challenge
Boston Government Services (BGS) is the prime contractor on the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s (EERE) largest support service contract. As part of the Mission Oriented Technical Services (MOTS) contract, BGS partners with the Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO), which provides funding for solar technology projects as part of its mission to accelerate decarbonization in the United States.
SETO desired a more efficient system to track and manage the renewable projects it funded. BGS worked with SETO to imagine a single system that would communicate with multiple independent federal systems currently used to track various aspects of projects to provide real time information on project status. The resulting system improved both project tracking efficiency and access to the real time project information necessary to provide timely and accurate project reports to Congressional and Executive Branch stakeholders.
Solution
BGS collaborated closely with a client-sponsored company to create the Solar Information Management System (SIMS) to provide reliable data in real time for all SETO projects. The BGS team followed an Agile approach to identify the critical functionalities needed, based on SETO client feedback and recommendations. BGS collaborated with the developers on design specifications, provided regular feedback on beta versions, and worked with users to identify bugs and improvement opportunities.
SIMS is a web application designed to include the entire SETO portfolio of projects and to facilitate their management.
- SIMS is a tool to support portfolio management and active project management that includes a complete history of SETO projects. It includes valuable and structured data for program evaluation purposes and is routinely used by team members to conduct quarterly assessments, respond to data calls, and to track and measure internal processes (such as negotiations of new awards or compliance with EERE requirements).
- SIMS automatically receives and processes data from multiple DOE and government-wide systems for both financial assistance awards and national laboratory agreements. Data sources include systems of record such as: Strategic Integrated Procurement Enterprise System (STRIPES), Annual Operating Plans (AOP), Financial Accounting Supporting Tool (FAST), Project Management Center (PMC), and the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), among others. SIMS also collects data from government-wide databases such as the System for Award Management (SAM) and reporting documents submitted by awardees in the Research Performance Program Report (RPPR) system, as well as manually entered data. It is designed to maximize automatic ingestion of data to increase data integrity and to ensure the system is always up to date.
- SIMS makes it possible to generate up-to-date project status reports for Congress and other stakeholders in real time.
For more information, please contact info@bgs-llc.com