The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) plays a vital role in safeguarding the public and the environment: regulating commercial power plants and the civilian use of radioactive materials. To enable efficient commission operations, NRC’s Office of the Chief Financial Officer (OCFO) oversees end-to-end activities, including accounting and financial management, budget execution, internal controls and fee billing to regulated entities.Â
Modernizing NRC financial operations
For over a decade, CGI has worked with the NRC OCFO to modernize its financial management operations. On the first day of fiscal year 2011, NRC launched its core financial system, the Financial Accounting Integrated Management Information System (FAIMIS). Based on CGI’s Momentum® federal enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, FAIMIS replaced 12 stand-alone legacy financial systems. Today, NRC’s budget analysts and clerical and accounting staff can access the entire financial operation on a single agency-wide system.
Over the past decade, NRC and CGI have continuously upgraded, evolved and optimized financial management at the commission. Executing on the FAIMIS roadmap, the team enables users to benefit from a modernized user interface while meeting government-wide mandates such as Treasury Invoice Processing Platform (IPP) integration, the DUNS to Unique Entity Identifier (UEI) transition and G-invoicing integration.
NRC was one of the first agencies to migrate its financial operations to a FedRAMP-authorized public cloud environment in 2016, reducing hosting costs, increasing service quality, expanding system capacity, enhancing security and improving recovery time.
Speeding processing, reducing effort through automation
Using CGI-developed tools, NRC has automated labor-intensive processes, significantly shortening completion time and eliminating the potential for human error. OCFO staff can be reallocated to higher value work based on automations supporting prior year de-obligation processing (reducing manual effort by 90%) and data reconciliation processing (reducing manual effort by 97%). Powered by automation, a previously labor-intensive (40-hour/month) cost allocation process now takes only one hour to complete.
Improving licensee experience with e-Billing
Together with the NRC, CGI replaced legacy manual, paper-based licensee billing processes with a platform-based eBilling system, wherein NRC can quickly transmit invoices directly from FAIMIS using a seamless real-time integration. eBilling eliminates thousands of pages of paper invoices and reduces costs to the NRC in manpower and printing. Licensees benefit from an expedited invoicing process, as they receive e-mail alerts when a new invoice is available, including details such as payment processing, invoice cancellation or change to invoice amount. Licensees can export their invoice details to PDF or Excel, empowering them to view and share invoice information and analyze details – all from their PC or mobile device.