Federal Homeland Security Agency Achieves Continuous Efficiency Gains with Acadis Readiness Suite

Background

After 20 years of leveraging the Acadis® Readiness Suite, a training management system (TMS) for federal government agencies, to streamline and improve its training and academy operations, this large federal Homeland Security agency continues to find additional efficiencies to reduce administrative time and gain time for mission-critical readiness. The initial goal two decades ago was to consolidate fragmented, disconnected academy systems with a centralized, interoperable federal training solution to enable seamless communication, data access, and automation of numerous manual processes.

Today, with the scalability of a purpose-built solution that evolves with customer operations and is supported by highly trained system specialists, this agency continues to maximize efficiency, saving both time and money.

The Challenge

With multiple academies, regional offices, and more than 28,000 agents, contractors, and state and local partners across the U.S., the agency’s training operations involved hundreds of manual and paper-based processes which consumed weeks and months of administration time and lacked cohesive and comprehensive data insights to improve operations.

Consolidating large, disparate systems and processes at this scale takes a dedicated team of specialists and the right federal TMS to enable efficiencies. But this agency proved, and continues to prove, that it can be done.

The initial project was significant in scope and involved:

• A full requirements analysis for each of the different academy operations
• Evaluation of existing systems
• Identification of best practices
• Careful data mapping to capture student and instructor training records, as these entities may have had records in more than one system
• Deployment of an integrated academy class management system

The dedicated team of federal agency and Acadis specialists not only met their initial objectives but continues to fine-tune operations to gain additional efficiencies and save time.

The Change

The shared Acadis academy class management system has allowed all participating academies to access a centralized database and gain economies of scale and cost savings for continued functionality enhancements. Acadis’ regional-based security configuration provided each region with the access it needed to view and modify their personnels’ records while headquarters maintained access to all training records. The agency was also able to consolidate multiple systems, including its Performance and Learning Management System (PALMS) by leveraging Acadis LMS to distribute courses to remote locations.

The latest efficiency gains have leveraged Acadis web forms and automated workflows to continue to digitize paper-based processes and automate formerly manual work. See more in the Return on Investment and Innovation section below.

Return on Investment and Innovation

• This large federal Homeland Security agency delivered over 417,000 mandatory training completions via Vector’s federal training solution in 2024.
• By leveraging strategic, consultative support provided by the Acadis Premier Account Manager, this agency created new workflows and class-based web forms which eliminated legacy paper-based processes, saving an estimated 12+ hours/week for administrative staff.
• The agency saved an additional 8+ hours/week by leveraging Acadis Continuous Innovation to develop an agency “Supervisor Portal Profile” that supports its decentralized reporting structure which enabled responsibility for managing training compliance at the supervisor level, where it can be more effectively tracked and monitored.
• The agency’s program managers worked with the Acadis team to develop more capability to print student and instructor versions of tests templates which gained them a time savings of 6-8 hours per class exam prep.

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