Military HR deal goes to PeopleSoft

PeopleSoft Inc. has lost out on some contracts for military enterprise resource planning over the past year, but last week the company became the Defense Department's choice for a standard human resources system for its 3.4 million employees.

The Naval Sea Systems Command awarded a $6.5 million contract to PeopleSoft to deliver a version of its human resources enterprise application for the Defense Integrated Military Human Resources System (DIMHRS) by March 2002, the Pentagon announced March 20.

DIMHRS is scheduled for deployment by the end of 2003 and will track military personnel from entry training through retirement. DOD organizations will also use the system to pay employees.

The application would, for example, enable a ship's commander to search the underlying DIMHRS relational database for a reservist with specific skills, such as someone who specializes in intelligence and can speak Japanese.

DIMHRS also will track reservists for pay and service credit. Because active-duty personnel and reservists in the Air Force, Army and Navy have been paid via separate payroll systems that lack synchronization, reservists returning from active-duty status sometimes have been paid for active duty after their return to reserve status.

Although DIMHRS is supposed to be a joint system, the services will have to agree on how to represent different rank levels, such as captain and lieutenant.

The Navy selected PeopleSoft, Pleasanton, Calif., over three competing vendors, according to DOD. Oracle Corp. and SAP America Inc. are PeopleSoft's primary competitors, and SAP had won the last six major DOD enterprise resource planning procurements.

According to the October 2000 rollout schedule, the Army will use DIMHRS first, said Jim McGlothlin, regional vice president for PeopleSoft. The service will use DIMHRS to replace its mainframe-based Standard Installation/Division Personnel System 3.0.

Air Force officials don't have immediate plans to deploy DIMHRS, he said, but the PeopleSoft win could displace Oracle's human resources application used there.

Navsea selected PeopleSoft 8 Human Resources Management System, the company's first browser-based HR system based solely on HTML, McGlothlin said.

DOD will select a relational database product to run the application after a year-long evaluation, said Maria LoVasco- Tolleson, a spokeswoman at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command Information Technology Center in New Orleans, which manages DIMHRS.