Feature

Awards Tracking, Evaluations, and Recruiting, Retention, and Enlisted Promotions System updates now available!

We've made lots of enhancements and updates to our Awards Tracking, Evaluations, and Recruiting, Retention, and Enlisted Promotions systems over the summer.  See the "Release Notes" for more details as to what enhancements and bug fixes were included in the release.

In addition we now have some additional demo/training videos of these systems available here:

/products/product-demonstration-videos.aspx

We are currently offering to waive our reinstatement fee for anyone who may have dropped their yearly maintenance and support for the Awards Tracking or Evaluations systems.  If you are interested in taking another look at these applications, contact me and we can set up a demo and/or take a credit card purchase to renew your support for the software and get you up and running on the latest version.

We are still working on the Enlisted Promotions functionality within the Recruiting, Retention, and Enlisted Promotions system.  We've made several enhancements to the E1-E3 promotions and are currently working on a process for generating 4100s for soldiers E4-E8.

News From TwinEngines

Case Management

We are continuing to enhance and improve our new Case Management system.  We've added new functionality to help you implement customized work-flows for completing a case.  For example, you can create a case type that includes a "Default Approval Process" where an approval activity is created from the soldier's organization, up through the intermediate commands, on up to the State level recap.  You can also create case types where you use a different approval process, going straight to personnel within a specific organization.  The system now also includes a "Forms Library" where you can upload a form (e.g. any IBM Form Flow or Adobe form) and have a Case Type that requires specific forms from the form library to be completed.

We are building some templates to automatically create cases based off of data quality issues within SIDPERS.  For example, we monitor SIDPERS looking for any officers that do not have a bachelor's degree in the CIVED field in SIDPERS.  This will create a new case whenever this situation arises and automatically assign the case to a SIDPERS Analyst to research and correct.  You can either push this out to the SIDPERS analyst at the soldier's organization, or handle it centrally at the State HQ level.

We hope to include multiple case types like this to help you monitor your SIDPERS data and correct data quality issues.  We are including an Import/Export facility for these kinds of case types so that you can share these with other states.

Contact me if you are interested in seeing a demo of this system or would like an evaluations license for the product to try it out.

New RCAS and SIDPERS Releases

As mentioned in our last newsletter, the new version of RCAS and SIDPERS requires some updates to the applications.  The new version of RCAS also requires some configuration changes to allow access to the RCAS database.  This affects both your PERMS Integrator users and the synch processes that pull data from RCAS in the web applications.  If you have not already dealt with this, see our FAQ here:

http://sharepoint.twinengines.com/NG/FAQ/RCAS%207%20Issues.aspx

The new version of SIDPERS requires a new version of E-Trans Manager that maps the Race and Religion codes from the old codes still being sent by ARISS to the new codes expected by SIDPERS.  This was incorporated in release 1.69 - May 2013, so check your release notes to make sure you have at least this version.

There have been some issues with the RPAM NGB23 statement generated by RCAS 7 as well.  We've fixed that issue as well in the latest version of PERMS Integrator (Version 3.86 - August 2013).

Latest Releases

For your convenience, here is a list of each of the products and their current version.  Check the Release Notes in each system to make sure you have the latest version.

*Includes Awards Tracking, Case Management, Evaluations, Recruiting, Retention, and Enlisted Promotions.

You can download these from: /support/downloads.aspx

Dean Baskin
dbaskin@twinengines.com

859-536-2540