I just found this on MOD Oracle....
http://www.modoracle.com
"RAF Takes Off With Joint Personnel Administration (JPA)
Monday, May 15, 2006
Source: RAF
On 20 March 06, the Armed Forces Personnel Administration Agency (AFPAA) successfully rolled out JPA to over 48,000 RAF Service personnel throughout the world on time and on budget. The event marked the culmination of five years system design, development, integration and testing and bears testimony to a very strong partnering arrangement between MOD and EDS.
The sheer scale and complexity of JPA should not be underestimated and from the very beginning, the joint project team has called on the experience and expertise of a range of military personnel and IT specialists. The project has involved the extraction of data from over 80 different legacy systems, cleaning it and transforming it into new requirements to load into a commercial Oracle HRMS system. For more than 48,000 RAF personnel, spread across the globe, this has amounted to over 3 million rows of data.
With any project of this complexity, even with extensive testing there will invariably be a small number of technical issues to overcome when the system goes live and JPA has been no exception. Although the system performed within satisfactory parameters on initial roll out to RAF professional HR administrators, once self service users were granted access, the sheer volume of the early transactions caused system performance to slow to unacceptable levels. Whilst still allowing full access to HR professionals and restricted access to self service users a number of fixes were made to the JPA system. These allowed the progressive introduction of additional functionality whilst providing core processes and maintaining acceptable system performance levels. As a result of this fine tuning, both HR professionals and self service users now have full access to the system with no degradation to the on line service.
A true measure of the JPA system would be its ability to run the very first pay roll. This was successfully achieved and bank payments were made to RAF personnel on 28 th April as planned. Where there have been a small number of minor discrepancies caused by the migration of data from the legacy system to JPA, these have already been rectified or will be in May's pay run. These were clearly ‘one off' start up issues that have now been addressed. Great efforts were made to ensure that the small number of individuals affected were not financially disadvantaged.
The introduction of JPA to the RAF and later to the RN and Army, presents a number of challenges. One of the most important is the cultural change required by individual Service personnel. The MOD firmly believe that today's Service men and women will welcome the opportunity to take control of their own personnel administration through JPA and would expect to have the same, and in some cases better, HR resources and opportunities available to them as any civilian employee.
The provisional JPA roll out dates for the RN and Army were June and Nov 06 respectively and were within the JPA project time frame. In order to allow far greater integration with the Defence Information Infrastructure (DII) project requirements, it was agreed by the JPA Project Board in Feb 06, that the rollout for the RN and Army should be more closely aligned with that for DII. As a result, the current plans are that JPA will be rolled out to the RN in Oct 06 and to the Army in March 07, although these dates are still subject to review and ratification by the JPA Project Board. This decision exemplifies a joined up and sensible approach to Defence wide project delivery and is not a reflection on AFPAA 's ability to deliver JPA.
JPA marks a huge leap forward for Defence, which requires not only an advanced technical solution, but a radical change for every branch and level of the Armed Forces. AFPAA have every confidence in the technical solution and are focused on delivering the quality of service on which our Armed Forces can depend and be proud.
"
I may have missed it earlier on in the thread but as it has todays date on it I thought I would repeat it here.
I particularly like the last paragraph, I certainly feel proud, mainly that I am in the Army, first time in a long time!!