May 14, 2008 - The U.S. Department of Defense has mandated use of the Pentagon's electronic Defense Travel System, effective immediately. A notice posted May 1 on DoD's Web site stated that "DTS will be the single, online travel system used by the Department," underscoring that DTS is the preeminent travel system for the military--and that it is not going away, as some congressmen and travel agents had hoped.
The directive is targeting all temporary duty travelers (TDY) who had been using legacy systems and commercial travel organizations for making travel arrangements. The mandate affects military and civilians of the Defense Department who travel on temporary duty, but does not affect family members of the military or contractors who support DoD, said Eileen Lainez, spokeswoman for the office of the assistant secretary of Defense for public affairs.
DTS, which has been in operation since 1998, is an end-to-end financial system for managing DoD travel that allows travelers to generate and route pre-trip authorization requests and make reservations. When their trips are complete, travelers also can create vouchers from the data already stored in DTS and electronically route them for approval and submission. DTS then can directly deposit payments to travelers' personal accounts and the government charge card vendor for reimbursement.
The system, however, has been plagued by difficulties and sharply criticized by the
Government Accountability Office and members of the House Committee on Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations for its lack of user-friendliness, as well as failing to provide lowest-cost routing and access complete airline flight inventory. As a result, travelers were slow to migrate to DTS and the savings predicted were not realized.
"We still have all of these legacy systems doing TDY, and that is not feasible," Darby Smith, GAO assistant director of financial management and assurance, told
Management.travel. "It's not a wise use of taxpayer dollars, as it costs about $37 to process each travel voucher manually as opposed to only $2 to do it electronically."
Under the system that relied heavily on commercial travel organizations for virtually all travel arrangements, there was no centralized focus on DoD's travel practices, travel policies were issued by different offices and the process was fragmented and "stovepiped," in the words of the April 2008 GAO report "Defense Travel System: Overview of Prior Reported Challenges Faced by DoD in Implementation and Utilization." In addition, there was "no vehicle in the current structure to overcome these deficiencies, as no individual within the department had specific responsibility for management control of the TDY travel system."
DTS was to remedy those problems, but, until recently, had so many problems of its own that senators Norm Coleman (R-MN) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) at one point introduced legislation to kill the travel portion of the system. Early on, some travel agents saw DTS as a threat to their livelihoods and argued against its adoption, said Alvin Chisik, partner with Merritt Chisik Management Consulting in Topanga, Calif.
The number of travel agents that are qualified for full and open competitions for DTS task orders has been reduced to about eight players, Chisik said. But in February of 2007 the Defense Department introduced a new reservations module, called Reservation Refresh, that specifically took aim at the system's shortcomings.
The Institute for Defense Analyses conducted an independent study of DTS and Reservation Refresh, and last year recommended its use. The Pentagon, meanwhile, agreed to numerous recommendations in the IDA report, including the issuance of a mandate to discontinue the use of all legacy systems "when DTS has the capability to support a very high percentage of all DoD travel."
DTS, however, is still far from fulfilling its promise. At a hearing before the House Committee on Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations April 15, Michael Dominguez, principal deputy undersecretary of Defense for personnel and readiness, testified that DTS was still only about halfway to satisfying its users. And only 86 percent of 11,000 intended DTS sites were in use, Dominguez said.
All were supposed to have been online by last year.
On the other hand, about 75,000 users now are logging on to DTS in an average workday, said DoD's Lainez. In 2007, 2.4 million users settled their vouchers using DTS, a number predicted to rise to 3.2 million this year, Lainez said. "Fiscal year to date, 59 percent of all TDY vouchers were processed in DTS," she said.
The Pentagon said it will take at least until 2010 before the system is operating to full capacity. When it does, DoD predicts it will save $90 million from voucher processing and $50 million from centrally billing accounts. Further, it expects to save another $23 million to $47 million in travel agency ticket fees when DoD-wide contracts are eventually awarded.
Currently, DTS is capable of handling about 95 percent of all DoD travel business, the Pentagon said.
