| PublicationDate: 8/18/99 Summary: The Recipient and Financial Management System (RFMS) Goes Live Author: AFMS - Accounting and Financial Management Service Posted on August 18, 1999 To: All Destination Points From: Greg Woods, Chief Operating Officer, Office of Student Financial Assistance Programs Subject: The Recipient and Financial Management System (RFMS) Goes Live This message- Announces the Implementation of the final Phase of RFMS UPDATE After taking a few extra days over the weekend to thoroughly verify and validate our Year 2000 testing, we are very pleased and proud to announce the implementation of the last portion of the new Recipient and Financial Management System. As of August 17, 1999, Phase IV of RFMS will be placed in production. In completing this final component of RFMS, all functionality of our new system will be available to you. Phase IV adds data request, information feeds to the National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS), and internal Department processing functionality. With a tremendous amount of hard work from those here at the Department and our contractors, and with the participation of many of you at our partner schools, we were able to meet this date. Congratulations to all involved. With the implementation of RFMS, OSFAP is taking a significant step forward in improving our business processes, technology and customer service to make us one of the best in business. With current batch processing turnaround times of 1 hour as opposed to several days with the old system, there is no doubt of our progress. Improvements in business processes that reduce the Potential Overaward Problem (POP), allow for Just in Time processing and lay the groundwork for Pell to interface with the Student Account Manager portion of Access America for Students are all steps in making the processing of Pell Grants easier for schools, students and the Department. WE WILL BE POSTING FURTHER UPDATES, AS NEEDED, UNDER THE ELECTRONIC ANNOUNCEMENTS SECTION, ON THE BOOKSHELF, AT THE INFORMATION FOR FINANCIAL AID PROFESSIONALS (IFAP) WEBSITE LOCATED AT http://www.ifap.ed.gov IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS - If you have questions, comments, or concerns about RFMS, please call Pell Customer Service at 1-800/474-7268 (select option 2) or send an e-mail to #Pell_Systems@ed.gov. - If you have questions about the 1999-2000 EDExpress Pell software, contact the Central Processing System customer service staff at 1-800/330-5947 or send an e-mail to CPS@NCS.COM. - If you have questions about RFMS message classes or problems connecting to the network, contact the TIVWAN customer service staff at 1-800/615-1189 or send an e-mail to T4WAN@NCS.COM. Reminder: Your TIVWAN EDConnect Desk Reference contains all the information you need about getting help by telephone or on the Internet. |