Pentagon Adopts Web Tools To Speed Up Contract Process.

• Author: Kutner, Joshua A.

The Defense Department is turning to the World Wide Web to expedite a growing backlog of contract paperwork.

By establishing a paperless contracting system, powered by the Internet, the Pentagon intends to save time and money, while speeding up payments to contractors for their good and services, according to defense officials.

Common sense has played a major role in the development of such tools, Pentagon officials have said time and time again. As advanced technologies became available, and as information sharing capabilities and the Internet expanded, it was only logical that U.S. Government agencies--the Defense Department being no exception--got the most out of these innovations.

Today, the Pentagon uses several Web systems to interact with contractors. These include that Web Invoicing System (WInS) and Wide Area Workflow Receipts and Acceptance (WAWF-RA). The Joint Electronic Commerce Program Office (JECPO) and the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) work in conjunction to bring these technologies to bear.

National Defense recently was invited to visit the Defense Department's Paperless Contracting office, in Arlington, Va., to view live demonstrations of the systems.

Diana L. Buttrey, DFAS program manager, led the WInS exhibition, and said that DFAS has had the capability to do Web invoicing for some time.

"Nobody's been doing business with us for quite a few years, but we've had the capability to do electronic invoicing and some contracting for years," said Buttrey. "We were having a hard time getting our contracting community to come onboard with electronic invoicing."

First, the Defense Department adopted DEI, or electronic data interchange. EDI is simply the exchange of information between two or more computers. But initially, it was not the sensation Pentagon officials hoped it would be.

"We actually started out with EDI," said Buttrey. "We were offering this capability to our vendors, but they weren't coming. 'Build it, and they will come,' doesn't always work."

For the corporate giants, EDI was easy. But not so for small businesses.

"Our vendor base across DFAS is very diverse. We have small, mom-and-pop shops. We have small other kinds of companies. We have medium-size companies. We have medium-large companies. And we have really large companies," said Buttrey. "The large companies did EDI without even blinking. ... And a lot of them do their own EDI translation."

There are more than 300,000 contractors that lobby for Pentagon business, and their sizes and revenues vary significantly. EDI, in the beginning, was not a healthy investment for many of the small...