Sandia executed the most CRADAs in a given year since 1999 and the highest dollar value in recent history. Fifty-eight CRADAs included 41 new agreements valued at $45 million and 17 amendments valued at $12 million. Sandia met with Technology Transfer teams from MIT (Lincoln Laboratory), PNNL, SLAC, LANL, LLNL, SRS, and NSC to discuss CRADA best practices and assist with their strategies. The CRADA Portfolio Development Team also received a Federal Laboratory Consortium Award for ingenuity in negotiating/executing an agreement with the New Jersey transit system. (10500)
The implementation of Division 8000’s Diversity and Inclusion five-year strategic plan, Vision 2020, is making an impact to create an inclusive workplace where every voice is heard. As part of this grassroots employee-led effort, 60 employees recently spent an energizing half-day celebrating Year 2 accomplishments and planning Year 3 initiatives. This past year’s activities include an unconscious- bias workshop for management, a Friends and Family day celebrating the summer intern projects, and the development of hiring-process tools to hinder bias and hire the best.
Sandia invests in the community by growing our diverse supplier base through monthly Open Houses, allowing suppliers to learn how to do business with the Labs while networking with supplier diversity advocates, technical staff, subcontracting professionals, Sandia risk management and suspect/counterfeit items specialists, and external community partners. In Fiscal Year 2017, 330 supplier representatives attended. Subsequently, more than $600,000 in subcontracts were awarded to capable Veteran- Owned, Service Disabled Veteran-Owned, Woman-owned, HUBZone, and Small Disadvantaged small businesses that attended the Open Houses. (10200)
Procurement improved the service model by creating the “My Procurements” section on Techweb. “My Procurements” allows internal customers to easily see and interact with orders an individual or program has in process. It provides information on who the buyer is, recent update notes, expiring Purchase Orders (where action may be needed), as well as a link to a site that includes additional information. This is the first of several tools being released to assist members of the workforce in tracking procurement requests. (10200)
The Move-It application, built in-house by IT partners in Advanced Enterprise Software Engineering, is one of Sandia’s newest laboratory-wide service-request systems. Move-It replaces two aging system, which the workforce in both New Mexico and California used to use to request Logistics services for moving, storing, and disposing of all hazardous and nonhazardous materials across both sites. This blend of innovation and familiarity gives customers a single, intuitive, and straightforward system to request Logistics’ services. (10200, 10700)
Laboratory Operating System
Sandia defined a high-level Laboratory Operating System (LOS) framework to increase Sandia’s capacity to learn, innovate, and respond to the rapidly changing environment. LOS is our purposeful multi-year journey to evolve the Laboratory culture to a learning organization, aided by six enablers (Tiered Accountability, Data-driven & Visual Management, Rapid Problem Solving and Continuous Improvement, User-Centered Design, Velocity Technology Development, and Strategy Deployment). One of the six enablers, Tiered Accountability, is currently deployed at the Director-level and above supporting timely information sharing, issue resolution, and transparency. (10100)
To increase transparency into Sandia’s overhead cost pools, the Labs deployed a new financial model at the beginning of FY18. The new Cost Accounting Standardscompliant model reduced the number of overhead cost pools by 50 percent, reduced the number of service centers by 75 percent, reduced the number of rates by more than 75 percent, and provides a significant reduction in indirect cost recycling. It will foster understanding of what Sandia spends taxpayer funds on and allow efficiencies to be gained in future years. (10500)
Sandia made significant changes to the travel process and launched enhancements to the expense report system (ERPlus). These changes included:
- Paperless receipt documentation for travel/non-travel expense reports
- Automated managerial approval for travel expense reports determined to be low risk
- Transition to per diem reimbursement for meals and incidental expenses
- Lodging costs verified using the Federal Travel Regulations that specify allowable costs based on destination
These changes simplified the travel process for employees and aligned Sandia practices to those of other major national labs. (10500)
On Oct. 30, the Program Management Office launched the Corporate Earned Value Management System (EVMS). It provides enterprise-wide consistency in project management and EVM processes, and also delivers effective and efficient project planning and controls and auditable, traceable, and reliable performance reporting. It improves customer confidence in Sandia, assurance for Sandia’s project management professionals that the processes will aid in delivering projects within scope, schedule and budget, and consistency in project management employee onboarding. Five online EVMS courses were delivered; eight more courses are being created. (10600)
Two corporate-supported reporting/analysis applications were released in October. Financial Analytics is a project reporting/visualization application providing financial project reporting from programmatic levels down to the lowest task level. It shows breakouts of expenditure types and detail, trending projections, and links to other financial systems. Org on a Page shows charged/managed projects at the organization level for divisions, centers, groups, and departments. It lets users drill down into project totals, the top five projects for charging and managed projects, high-level non-base info, and HR counts info. (10600)
PLANSPONSOR Magazine named Sandia’s Savings and Income Plan as a 2017 Best in Class 401(k) plan. Thirty-four plans were selected out of 3,381 based on 30 criteria related to design, oversight/governance, and participant outcomes. (10500)
New CET functionality enabling users to quickly estimate labor related to chargebacks won a Division 10000 Innovation Award. The project was completed ahead of schedule. The wide-ranging impacts include:
- Reduced the time needed to calculate project impacts from several weeks per project to several days.
- Gives analysts wider consideration when making changes to their financial models.
- Enables the controller to analyze multiple options and communicate the impacts of Burden Rate and Standard Labor Rate changes, which helps support datadriven decisions across the Labs. (10700, 10600)
The EBI team launched the Enterprise Business Intelligence Portal (EBI) to replace older, less user-friendly reporting systems with a modern tool for managing HR and financial reporting. EBI provides a single, trusted source of data for enhanced security and consistency. It will significantly reduce staff time and effort in gathering, interpreting, and sharing data for management decision making and regulatory compliance. (10700)
An outreach effort by Enterprise Collaboration Services (ECS) and partners led to a 50-percent increase in Skypebased collaboration on the classified network. ECS worked with the Nuclear Weapons Planning, Operations office, and Assurance Deputy and Classified Computing Continual Service Improvement to provide cameras, headsets, and microphones to more than 200 people. Personalized training helped make users comfortable using Skype on the classified network. (10700, 2010)
Sandia IT established a new mobile credential that simplifies access to internal web resources for users of Sandia-owned iPhones and iPads. More than 5,500 users have received instructions for installing the credential, which has been loaded so far on about 1,450 devices. The credential allows remote access, without a Crypto- Card, to frequently used resources such as timesheets and expense reports. (10700)