Innovation, automation takes strain off finance customers Published July 1, 2016 By Christpoher Ball 412th Test Wing Public Affairs EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. -- Many Team Edwards members are familiar with long waits at Finance Customer Service, but some creative and innovative thinking may have put an end to all that. A junior officer here developed a new Sharepoint-based Financial Services tool to simplify the customer request process, and to reduce time wasted in travel and waiting in line. "Our customers around the base, especially at AFRL (Air Force Research Lab) and South Base, have to take a lot of time to come in and get customer support and fill out forms," said 1st Lt. Alexander Lindsay, deputy chief of financial analysis with the 412th Comptroller Squadron. "Now it's available on line, Sharepoint based, so they can actually get on the Sharepoint site and submit a request straight from their desk," he said. "They don't even need come see us or to call or email." Lindsay said that even though the automated Sharepoint tool is up and running, finance customers still have the option to come to customer service if they would like. The Lieutenant added that customers could track the status of their requests through the same tool, either by looking it up on line, or signing up for email updates. While the bulk of the work was done by Lindsay, he said he could not take all the credit for the concept. His commander, Lt. Col. Michael McPherson, was the guiding hand that got him started. "My initial inbrief as a second lieutenant with Col. McPherson -- he sat me down and said "these are the things that I want you to do." I was pretty overwhelmed, it was my first day on base and I had just commissioned," Lindsay said. "He gave me the problem, then gave me some direction. He kind of guided me through it." Being a business major, Lindsay wasn't necessarily familiar with the technical aspects of developing this tool. "I never thought that being in finance I would be doing all this programming and website design. But I'm enjoying it so far," he said. "There's a lot of challenges developing a tool this complicated," Lindsay added. He said that since the tool is all Common Access Card enabled, developing security safeguards was one hurdle. "And the testing phase - having customers come in and use it and give feedback," he said. "They gave me a lot of good feedback. Now it's to the point where we don't have to do updates or modifications that often." The technical challenges, along with his primary duty as deputy flight commander created a few speedbumps in the process. "Being deputy flight commander, I had a lot of administrative work along with developing this tool, Lindsay said. "It's not like I could just sit down and develop this tool. It was a long process. I didn't get started on it until I got back from my technical training, then it was about eight months from start to finish to develop it. The locally-constructed financial tool was recently adopted by Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. The lieutenant said he spent a week with their finance team there earlier this month. "We're doing kind of a cross pollination, where we were taking their best practices and they were taking our best practices," Lindsay said. "For us it's a lot of automation. We have a lot of crazy tools that we use that we feel improve our processes. They had some good things that I took from them too." According to Lindsay, Eglin AFB began using his tool to process some financial documents for Edwards AFB June 24. "Because we are so low manned right now, they are actually taking and processing some of our military pay transactions through this tool," Lindsay said. "They're 3,000 miles away but they're still getting the job done."