Archive | July, 2009

U.S. Bank and Visa Introduce Syncada

U.S. Bank (PowerTrack) formally announced earlier this week that they have mergered forces with Visa to create Syncada. Through this joint-venture, Syncada will offer global payment system solutions to financial institutions worldwide by combining PowerTrack’s payment system logic and Visa’s experience with payment services and managing multi-bank networks. To see the complete press release, click here….
PowerTrack has advised that Syncada will be a seamless transition for existing PowerTrack clientele. All PowerTrack processes and contacts will remain the same

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Daycos Employees Working Hard to 'Be Well'

On April 1, 2009, Daycos started offering a new benefit to all of our employees: a new wellness program (‘Be Well’). This program focuses on three main areas, which are Annual Exams, Tobacco Use, and a Healthy Body. Employees and their spouses have the option to reduce their health insurance costs based on these three areas, as well as receive a few extra perks to help them out along the way, if they want to participate.
Regarding Annual Exams, the…

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400NG Tariff Update

Earlier this week, there was an update to the 400NG Tariff posted to the “What’s New” site of SDDC’s website. While there were no programming changes required for our billing form or AccuBill, there were verbiage changes made to the 400NG that have provided clarification or added new language to particular billing items. Some of the changes are as follows:

Item 17 – Storage-In-Transit (SIT) - Added verbiage addressing use of DOD-Approved SIT facilities as well as provided guidelines for …

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Other DOD IT Projects Cost

After finding the information about the cost of the DPS system, I thought it might be interesting to see the costs of some other familiar Department of Defense IT projects. From the Federal IT Dashboard website, here are the 3 year costs for some other DOD programs: (in millions)

Program: TOPS
Description: Transportation Operational Personal Property Standard System automates and standardizes personal property movement storage and management functions for all DOD and Coast Guard Personal Property Shipping and Processing …

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How Much Does DPS Cost?

I was reading an article recently about the efforts of the Obama administration to increase transparency in government spending. This article was focusing specifically on their efforts to highlight government spending on IT projects through a newly created website, called the Federal IT Dashboard….
I was curious if this website would contain any information about the government IT project that is so important to our industry, the DPS system. The website has many nice charts and graphs you can

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Fuel Surcharge for Period 7/15/09 to 8/14/09

The price of fuel was $2.59 per gallon as reported on Monday, July 6, 2009 making the upcoming FSC rates for the period 7/15/09 through 8/14/09 as follows:

GBL Domestic HHG / International HHG & UB – 1%
GSA Domestic HHG – $0.95
GSA International HHG and BAG – $0.95…

NOTE – With the reported cost of fuel now exceeding the $2.50 baseline amount the fuel adjustment will apply for the first time in six months for the specified period.

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A Trifecta of Problems

As of 11 AM CST this morning, we have been unable to access DPS, CWA, or PowerTrack all morning. DPS had a scheduled downtime that was supposed to end at 5 AM, but it has not come back up yet. CWA is also inaccessible, and while we can login to PowerTrack, there is no other functionality that seems to be working. While it is not unusual for DPS to be down, it is less common to have problems with CWA…

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DPS Invoice Rejections

Over the last week, we have witnessed a sharp rise in the number of rejected DPS invoices. While all of the causes are not yet determined, there are a few factors that we have learned are contributing to the sudden increase.
To start, for much of June, there were communication errors between DPS and PowerTrack (PT)that delayed the reporting of the rejected invoices for TSPs to access complete lists of all invoices that had been rejected. This issue was resolved…

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