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CACI Q&A With Senior Vice President Laura Floyd on Human Capital Management

Human Capital Management for Optimized Workforce Performance

Human Capital Managementcac

The U.S. Government is the nation’s largest employer, with over 4.2M people across the military, civilian, legislative, and judicial branches. With that immense population of employees comes difficult human resource-related challenges. 

In the interview below, Laura Floyd, CACI Senior Vice President, Human Capital Management, discusses how the company delivers full lifecycle solutions that drive transformation from “hire to retire” at the Department of Defense (DoD) and throughout the federal government. If you wish to schedule an interview with Laura, please contact CACI Corporate Communications at [email protected].

In general, what does Human Capital Management mean?

Employees are every organization’s most valuable asset. Human Capital Management, or HCM, is about improving how an organization manages its people – improving business processes and technical applications to maximize the value of its human capital. Effective HCM improves the systems and processes that enable an organization to anticipate workforce staffing needs, source qualified candidates, hire top performers, and help the workforce manage and grow their careers – all of which has a tremendous impact on how well an organization functions and how satisfied their employees are with their careers. In a nutshell, it’s all about people, productivity, and efficiency. 

What CACI experts bring to the table is a set of practices that take many disparate HR systems and streamline them into one cohesive integrated system, or even a set of systems. They fall into three broad categories – workforce acquisition, workforce management and payroll, and workforce optimization. Our experts bring the technologies and expertise that transform how organizations manage their most important asset – their people.

How does CACI help the federal government enhance its Human Capital Management deliverables?

CACI’s HCM solutions, which range from payroll solutions and IT modernization to large-scale enterprise resource planning systems, help our customers manage human capital in the most efficient and cost-effective way. Our goal is to bridge the gap between people and technology. How can we make it easier for the soldier or sailor to access and submit changes to their employee records that drive their pay and benefits? If we can improve that process by reducing the time it takes to complete the action and the number of errors that sometimes occur in such a transaction, then we have made the soldier’s life easier, the HR department’s job easier, and we save our customers money by saving them time. After all, our customers want their employees focused on their mission and not worrying about whether their pay and benefits are accurate, which affect their loved ones. CACI has an impressive track record of delivering large, at-scale core HR system modernization across the government. Our customers include the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, Intelligence Community, and federal civilian organizations. They turn to us for better, more streamlined HCM solutions. 

One example of where our HCM solutions have made a huge impact is under the Integrated Personnel and Pay System-Army (IPPS-A) contract. IPPS-A is an enterprise digital solution that will standardize, streamline, and integrate Soldier personnel and pay processes and data across all Army components (active Army, Army National Guard, and Army Reserve). It’s the largest integrated human resources system in the world of its kind, and once fully completed, it will be the authoritative source of personnel and pay information for more than one million soldiers. The best part is that it consolidates approximately 60+ different systems into one, and you can imagine how much easier and less expensive that will be to operate and manage.  Most importantly, it will give the Soldiers an improved end user experience for their HR and payroll needs.

We just reached a milestone on that contract when CACI’s team assisted the Army in completing the first deployment of IPPS-A application to the Army National Guard, bringing the total number of users to more than 340,000. CACI is currently building the next release of IPPS-A application for the Reserve and active duty soldiers, which will increase the number of users to approximately 1,200,000.

This system is extremely beneficial for Army personnel. Previously, if a soldier had a baby, that soldier would need to walk into an office to have an HR professional manually make this status change to their records through various steps, and it would take weeks for the change to be effective in the system. Now, a status change such as getting married or having a child can be done in seconds from a computer or smartphone. So streamlining that process has dramatically increased efficiency and reduced cost, while improving the lives of our Armed Forces personnel.  

How does CACI differentiate itself from other companies that offer HCM solutions?

CACI takes a comprehensive, big-picture approach – from hire to retire – that addresses both the technical and human factors of federal HCM. That means three things:

  • First, is the technology, the technical infrastructure and systems on which HCM is built. We provide industry-leading Agile development for enterprise HCM solutions and implement integrated processes that improve productivity and effectiveness. 
    One key technology is robotic process automation (RPA), or the use of software technology – a “robot” – to automate routine tasks. Ultimately, this leads to even more efficiency and cost savings. We’ve seen RPA used to help with onboarding processes for new employees at organizations where it has reduced processes from 138 minutes down to three minutes. That’s an incredible result, and it makes HR processes predictive, useful, and reliable.
  • Second, our services include the ancillary work processes that support HCM, such as recruitment marketing, employer branding and employee training - things large organizations desperately need to attract, train, and keep the right talent. These are all in-house services. We don’t subcontract it out. Our functional experts have been supporting the federal government in these areas for decades. When you combine those services with workforce planning and modeling – the process of predicting workforce needs – you get a very strategic and dynamic solution set to manage your current and future workforce from hire to retire.  It’s a full end-to-end lifecycle offering that really can’t be beat.
  • Third – and most importantly – we’ve been successfully delivering these services to the federal government for decades. We understand federal and DoD HR processes, policies and regulations. We have broad and deep experience in every aspect of federal HCM. We will never try to force a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) solution onto an organization that is not, in the end, a commercial organization without applying business process reengineering to account for the processes, business rules, and culture of our federal government customers.

What’s the biggest challenge customers face with HCM and how can that be addressed?

The biggest challenge is the proliferation of stovepipe legacy systems in use to support the HCM processes. The lack of integrated systems creates huge challenges with maintaining and improving systems to keep up with evolving business processes across the HCM lifecycle. To move to modern integrated HCM systems and databases, especially with a focus on COTS solutions, we use business process reengineering (BPR) augmented with process simulation to help align and adjust business processes to maximize the use of the COTS products out-of-the-box. This BPR with simulation facilitates end-to-end process analysis and significantly reduces COTS customization and increases COTS process alignment.  The process simulation also addresses another part of the transformation challenge, process change management. Change management must be addressed early and throughout the transformation to COTS to gain user acceptance of the system prior to implementation. 

Another key capability we use is model-based systems engineering (MBSE) to support mapping of legacy processes, business rules, requirements, and policies from the as-is legacy environment to the to-be solution.  Our MBSE approach called Model Driven Design Integration (MDDI) is being used on large scale transformation programs such as the MyNavyHR Transformation.  It provides end-to-end integration and traceability of processes, requirements, business rules, designs, COTS configuration decisions, data requirements, interfaces, test cases, and enterprise DODAF compliant artifacts. This traceable repository of artifacts supports requirements, design, and testing consistency as well as impact assessments for future changes to requirements or systems. On a large complex transformation program, MDDI helps to make sure that legacy process, business rules, and data requirements are all accounted for or resolved in the new to-be modern solution.

Human Capital Management for Optimized Workforce Performance

Human Capital Managementcac

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