Return
to the "POINTER VIEW"June 7, 2002
Return
to the "POINTER VIEW"
June
7, 2002
WASHINGTON (Army Personnel Command) -- The Army’s new electronic military personnel office, eMILPO, will greatly improve basic personnel actions and save soldiers’ time, officials said, when it goes online later this year.
Current plans call for eMILPO to be implemented in December as the next major step for Army personnel transformation.
It is part of an ongoing effort by the Army personnel community to consistently seek ways to improve basic accounting and business practices for soldiers worldwide, said a Personnel Command official.
First, there were morning reports prepared by first sergeants. Soldiers in line to get paid were common practice in the Army in the 1980s. Then came several versions of the Standard Installation Division Personnel System, known as SIDPERS. Permanent change-of-station departure and arrival transactions are examples of how SIDPERS "tracks" soldiers today.
"The problem with SIDPERS, however, is that it has slipped behind and is no longer an efficient way to manage soldiers," said Col. Howard Olsen, a career adjutant general officer and commander of the Enlisted Records and Evaluation Center in Indianapolis.
eMILPO is a Web-based system and will require little training.
It is an interim step toward a much larger, multi-service, integrated personnel and pay management system called the Defense Integrated Military Human Resources. DIMHRS will be driven primarily by PeopleSoft8, a pure Internet commercial-off-the-shelf software.
Paula Davis, director of the Army DIMHRS Office, said the Army would be the first service to implement the Department of Defense program in the third quarter of 2004.
"It will revolutionize how the Army does personnel and pay business," she said. "Soldiers will get online for both personnel and pay services instead of getting in-line at separate offices."
DIMHRS builds upon eMILPO with an integrated personnel and pay system that creates a common database for all military services, Davis said.
Some of the key personnel functions eMILPO will improve are updates to the DoD Form 93, reassignments, promotion transactions, manning reports, DEERS and personnel accountability, according to Doug Ruggiero, U.S. Army Personnel Command.
"It will put the "p" back in personnel because the eMILPO learning curve is expected to be only 30 minutes," Ruggiero said. "It’s going to really improve the personnel business for everyone."
eMILPO would provide improvements to the following key personnel functions:
- updates to DoD Form 93
- reassignments
- promotion transactions
- manning reports
- DEERS
- personnel accountability