Daycos News

The number of DPS invoices we are processing has slowly, but steadily, continued to rise. As of today, Daycos has submitted 174 invoices to DPS, of which 67 had been paid. We have had 13 invoice go into Audit Exception status, which is about 20% of the total invoices, which is up slightly from our last update.

We are growing increasingly concerned about transmission errors, which occur when invoices fail to move through the approval/payment process due to technical issues. We have had previous instances where invoices have been hung up for many days due to system wide problems at DPS, and we currently have 49 invoices that are "stuck" due to transmission problems, some for as long as two weeks. When the number of invoices submitted is this small, the problems are manageable. However, if the volume of DPS shipments ramps up as quickly as is being proposed, these types of problems will cause massive disruption in the invoicing process.

We continue to work through the other rating discrepancies and related issues with SDDC and JPMO-HHGS. We have not yet seen any widespread problems in this area, but we don't yet have a huge volume of paid invoices from which to judge. Also, we have not yet been able to successfully rate any Alaska shipments in the test environment, but there is a lot of effort being put forth on that issue, so we would expect resolution to that issue fairly soon.

We have received confirmation from PowerTrack that it is again the time of year for them to access and deduct their yearly user fees. According to the PowerTrack Help desk, they began assessing the fees at the first of the year and started applying the charges at the end of January. The fee is again $25 for each ID that has been created or used within 2008. The fee will be deducted from the first deposit to your account after January 31, 2009. If you have any questions or concerns regarding your fee, please contact the PowerTrack help desk at customer.support@powertrack.com.

We recently learned that the CWA and DPS Help Desk email addresses have changed. Last fall when the SDDC Systems Response Center was opened, we were advised that all email addresses would remain the same and had continued using the email address of cwa-helpdesk@sddc.army.mil for the CWA Help Desk and DPSHelpdesk@sddc.army.mil for the DPS Help Desk. This week we learned that the new CWA Help Desk email address is sddc.safb.cwahd@us.army.mil and the new DPS Help Desk email address is sddc.safb.dpshd@us.army.mil.

The price of fuel was $2.25 per gallon as reported on Monday, February 2, 2009 making the upcoming FSC rates for the period 2/15/09 through 3/14/09 as follows:

GBL Domestic HHG / International HHG & UB - 0%
GSA Domestic HHG - $0.00
GSA International HHG and BAG - $0.00

NOTE - You are reading correct above, for the second month in a row, there is NO fuel surcharge applicable for the specified period. The baseline rate that is used to calculate the fuel surcharge adjustment is $2.50. With the reported cost of fuel now below that baseline amount, a fuel adjustment does not apply.

On Wednesday, January 28th, the Daycos staff had the opportunity to tour a local carrier, Andrews Van Lines, located here in Norfolk, Nebraska. The tour provided the Daycos staff with first-hand information as to what is involved with a carrier's side of a move, since our knowledge lies mainly with the final invoicing of the shipment to the finance center. We were able to see the various box sizes used for packing items for transportation; the dispatch office provided a look at what is involved in booking, accepting, and carrying out a shipment; the billing office gave the Daycos staff a view of the billing practices used at Andrews Van Lines; and our staff also received insight into the software utilized by the IT department at Andrews Van Lines.

Our staff is very appreciative of the tour and feels more knowledgeable about the overall process of a military move, from the beginning to the end; as well as having the opportunity to meet all of the Andrews employees. Everyone enjoyed lunch, and the opportunity to get to know each other on a more personal level.

As of a yesterday, Daycos has submitted 81 "live" DPS invoices. After a slow start, and a lull due to the holidays, the pace of invoices has picked up recently, with 30 of those 81 generated in the last week.

Since many are recently submitted and still in process, it is hard to draw too many conclusions about the success so far, but we have been able to receive payment on 24 invoices. Of those 24 that were paid, 4 went into Audit Exception status. Although it is too few of invoices to draw any firm conclusions, it represents about a 17% Audit Exception ratio. That percentage is higher than we hope to be long-term, but it is a reasonable number for the start of a new system.

In addition to the 4 audit exception invoices, for which we are still investigating the causes, the only other problems we have encountered so far have been the transmission problems last week, and a slower than normal response time from PPSO in approving the DPS invoices. We believe the reason for the delay in PPSO response is due to a few different factors.

First, DPS is a new system and they are not yet used to working those invoices on a daily basis, like they do with CWA. Second, the ETA login problems that plagued DPS obviously made it difficult for PPSOs to access the system to do invoice approvals. Finally, we have seen some delays due to the uncertainty of PPSOs on how to handle the electronic nature of the 400NG domestic tariff. We have received notes from PPSOs indicating that they will not approve the invoices until they can "see the rates," in reference to the underlying rates in the 400NG, which are not published in the tariff and only available electronically. It appears that not all of the PPSOs were aware that the tariff was an electronic tariff, and that their only way to verify the rates is to access the AMSA software program through ETA. As that word is spread among PPSOs, we hope to see response times improve.

All in all, it has been a fairly positive start to the invoicing process in DPS. I would expect that over the next month, as invoicing picks up in volume, we will really get a good idea of how smoothly the DPS invoicing process will go.