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U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Pericia Barrow, 60th Communications Squadron cyber systems operator, works on a computer Sept. 23, 2021, at Travis Air Force Base, California. The 60th Communications Squadron maintains and troubleshoots Air Mobility Command’s second largest network, providing secure and non-secure connectivity for Travis AFB’s three wings and 55 partner units. (U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Alexander Merchak)

JOCAS II v7.0 Oracle Upgrade and Hardware Refresh

Published June 9, 2022
By Business and Enterprise Systems Directorate

WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio -- In order to provide increased system availability and reliability, the Business and Enterprise Systems Directorate’s Job Order Cost Accounting System (JOCAS II) team successfully deployed two major initiatives in April 2022.

The JOCAS II mission enables system users from nine sites to accumulate and track labor costs, accept cost transactions from Department of Defense systems, support customer pricing and rates, track reimbursable work efforts, process customer billing, support work effort estimates for customer review, and develop and distribute indirect, direct, and overhead costs. These capabilities allow users to accomplish their respective duties in order to provide mission support to their respective MAJCOMs. JOCAS II currently supports approximately 13,000 users across Air Combat Command, Air Force Research Laboratory, and U.S. Space Force.

This new design gives the user community full redundancy in the system, eliminating unanticipated downtime while reducing system security vulnerabilities. It features a clustered environment and a new storage area network (SAN). This provides a fault tolerant architecture reducing downtime while increasing storage and speed. Implementation also fixed several security technical implementation guide (STIG) violations providing greater protection against any malicious attacks.

At the same time, the team also performed a difficult technical stack update from Oracle 12c to 19c. By combining a hardware refresh and tech stack update the team saved significant time and money by not having to go through two full processes. This parallel approach allowed the nine sites to perform one round of extensive testing versus two rounds and saved up to a year in schedule which equates to approximately two million dollars on support contract costs.

SAF/FMF (AFFSO) was elated on how smooth the hardware refresh and tech stack upgrades were accomplished. The users were able to run payroll activities a few days after the upgrade, which astonished the Financial Management field.