'Getting to green' with SAS® Activity-Based Management

US Fish and Wildlife Service moves toward 'green' in budget and performance integration

Using SAS, the US Fish and Wildlife Service is set to become the first Department of Interior agency to meet a mandate designed to help federal agencies make better decisions about how to spend taxpayers' dollars. SAS Activity-Based Management is helping the Fish and Wildlife Service better integrate cost and performance data.

The mandate stems from the President's Management Agenda, which is designed to help government agencies become more citizen-centered, results-oriented and market-based. The agency deployed the SAS solution in June 2004 on a dual-processor Dell server through a partnership with Grant Thornton's Global Public Sector business advisers.

"We looked at other software packages and found two things: SAS' product is easier to use than the others, and SAS provides a great deal of flexibility in terms of attributing costs," says Kathy Tynan, Chief of Planning and Evaluation for the Fish and Wildlife Service. "Plus, we particularly liked the Web access capabilities in SAS that the other products did not have."

The Web capabilities make it possible for the agency to provide up-to-date, online reports to eight regional Fish and Wildlife Service offices and more than 850 field offices across the United States.

Measuring acceptable costs
With a $2 billion budget and a mission to conserve, protect and enhance fish, wildlife, plants and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people, the Fish and Wildlife Service delivers this mission at each regional office through five core programs:

• Operation of the National Wildlife Refuge System.
• Restoration of fisheries and conservation of habitat.
• Recovery of threatened or endangered species.
• Conservation of migratory birds and support of state fish and wildlife programs.
• Conservation of international fish and wildlife species.

In the past, Tynan says, budgetary data was viewed only to determine how much money was budgeted for specific program expenses and in specific categories, such as equipment, human resources and improvements in each area. "Federal agencies normally budget by functions, so we're budgeting for set expenses within these five programs," she says.

Unfortunately, this traditional budget perspective does not reveal the relationships or strategies that are shared between programs or offices, or the similar types of work that each program completes in conjunction with sister programs. Nor does a traditional budget compare the costs of similar tasks carried out in different groups or regions.

Using SAS software, the agency can track every expense and every hour of work back to those individual programs and to hundreds of activities carried out in the various subcategories within each program. Now, the Fish and Wildlife Service also can integrate those program costs as multiple contributions to products or services delivered to the public. As a result, agency leaders can better understand the full cost of business operations and make better assessments about acceptable levels of cost for each activity.

"The opportunity that we have to look at cost and performance with SAS allows us to aggregate the programs into a performance view," says Tynan. "SAS gives us clear visibility into our performance, and it gives clear visibility of the costs for product delivery, so we have a clear line of sight between costs and results."

Traditional budgeting, on the other hand, doesn't give insight into the cost of agencywide products or performance goals, such as the restoration of wetlands or the enhancement of upland areas. With SAS, agency managers can see every activity and every expense that goes into achieving those goals, including the percentage of administrative and overhead costs required to support each goal.

National and regional benefits
The SAS solution combines and analyzes data from the federal financial system, the federal payroll and personnel system, and many other local data sources. Using the system, Fish and Wildlife has mapped each of its performance metrics for every program up to agency goals and to Department of the Interior performance goals.

At the national level, Fish and Wildlife Service leaders are already using the results to help develop performance-based and activity-based budgets for upcoming years. "It's really been a team effort between the Planning and Evaluation staff and Grant Thornton to pull together the information and provide it in such a way that senior managers can begin to incorporate cost data and performance into their budgeting decision process for FY 2007," explains Tynan. "In addition, the Fish and Wildlife Service has used the cost and performance data in an initial administrative study."

The administrative study is a hands-on cost analysis that examines the costs of administrative tasks across the entire Fish and Wildlife Service. Using activity-based cost data, the agency was able to compare relative performance levels across regions to determine which regions appeared to be the most cost-effective from a "cost of performance" perspective.

This data was then used to target surveys of the cost-effective operations and identify internal best practices that are being recommended for adoption across the bureau to improve efficiency and productivity in all the regions.

Partnering for a great solution
To measure progress toward strategic goals, the White House and the Office of Management and Budget use the Executive Branch Management Scorecard – a traffic-lighting system of red, yellow and green to indicate whether projects are falling short of, meeting or exceeding expectations. Using SAS, Tynan says, Fish and Wildlife will be one of the first Interior bureaus to exceed expectations in the area of cost performance integration.

"SAS is the cornerstone piece of us 'getting to green' in this effort," says Tynan, but she also is quick to point out the benefits of working with the consultants at Grant Thornton.

"Partnering with Grant Thornton has been a very rewarding experience for the Fish and Wildlife Service," says Tynan, "not only with the SAS product but as a consulting group as well. I think SAS has a great partner in Grant Thornton."

Copyright © SAS Institute Inc. All Rights Reserved.