Delphi is operating in seven of our organizations, a prelude to the more complex installations elsewhere in the department. Delphi will be accessed through the Web. All of these are in the domain of the chief financial officer, so they are relatively easy, but sometimes painful, to put in place. Our procurement executives and the finance community agreed to adopt the Defense Department s Central Contractor Registry. This registry provides automatically a vendor s taxpayer identification number and bank-account data, which are needed to make electronic payments to vendors as required by law.
Vendors register, sending the data in once and changing their registration data later.
All federal agencies can use it to make payments. We believe this is the de facto federal standard. We are hoping that financial-systems software vendors will offer and maintain a standard interface to the contractor registry. Following the private sector, the next logical step is to adopt electronic invoices as a way of doing business with Transportation perhaps with all of the federal government. Again DoD is leading the way.