The Official Personnel Folder (OPF) is a file containing records that cover a civilian federal employee's employment history. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the agency human resources (HR) offices use these documents to make decisions about employees' rights, benefits and entitlements throughout their careers.
The eOPF is an electronic version of the paper OPF, providing Web-enabled access for federal employees and HR staff to view eOPF documents. Agencies also may provide eOPF access to special investigators, helping to speed the investigation process and save agency resources.
The content of all eOPFs are organized and stored in accordance with the Guide to Personnel Recordkeeping (GPR) and other pertinent legal and/or regulatory guidance. These various references are documented in the Office of Personnel Management Master Forms List. The eOPF provides a standard electronic solution to replace the paper storage of the OPF.
The eOPF is stored electronically in a secure central repository, with role-based security for access to the records. The eOPF incorporates an audit trail for all user activity. Agency HR and payroll systems provide an automated interface with eOPF, and agencies use the automated business processes to support HR review and approval efforts without paper. The eOPF includes the ability for simultaneous viewing of documents from different locations allowing an employee and HR specialist to access the records at the same time. The eOPF allows HR resources to focus on strategic value added services rather than the daily filing activities required for paper documents.
Paper records are subject to damage or destruction by fire or water. The eOPF electronic records are regularly backed up, and the eOPF provides disaster recovery to assure continuity of operations in any situation.
Government requirements for data security are incorporated globally to address such issues as data access controls/permissions, PKI encryption of Web-enabled interfaces, and data delivery over the web.
eOPF Implementation Process is divided into five phases: Pre-Assessment, Assessment, Application Deployment, Conversion, and Production Support. At any given time, there are multiple agencies performing tasks within each phase of eOPF thus providing agencies with the opportunity to collaborate with, and learn from similar experiences of their agency peers. Innovative technology solutions, leadership and the development of best practices have guided the eOPF program.
In addition to providing centralized system hosting and operational best practices for EHRI eOPF, EHRI also offers customer support and implementation resources to guide agencies during conversion and beyond.
Advantages for HR Specialists
Human Resources (HR) specialists strive for efficiency, flexibility, and security in managing HR records. EHRI's eOPF solution increases productivity and efficiency, and frees HR staff to work directly with the federal employee to resolve issues and answer questions. Specifically, eOPF and analysis & reporting help agencies:
- Reduce re-work caused by inaccurate or missing personnel data/folders
- Enable efficient, accurate workforce planning and human capital management
- Eliminate oversight of employee review of personnel folders
- Automate employee notifications
- Enhance accuracy, portability and security of personnel records
- Provide immediate access to employee data for a geographically dispersed workforce
The security functionality allows an agency to grant individual eOPF access to each employee. This provides the employee the ability to review personal eOPF data, which increases employee awareness and accountability. Additionally, eOPF facilitates the electronic filing of SF-50 data and automates employee notification of actions through email alerts. Several agencies have leveraged the eOPF underlying technology to automate approval processes and document removal, further improving HR Specialists' ability to perform job functions quickly and effectively.
While these benefits are compelling read the answers to frequently asked questions to learn more about eOPF.
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Customer Support
The EHRI Project Management Office (PMO) is experienced not only in eOPF operations and execution, but also with cross-over requirements and integration with other eGov initiatives such as ePayroll and Retirement System Modernization.
EHRI assigns a project lead to guide each agency through the eOPF conversion process. All aspects of the conversion are jointly managed through the EHRI PMO and the agency. Comprehensive customer support includes:
- National Business Center hosting
- Help Desk service
- Training for HR specialists and eOPF administrators
- HR and employee user guidance and processes
In addition, the EHRI governance structure ensures its goals and objectives are accomplished with participation from key stakeholders through:
- eOPF Users Group that provides feedback, allows agencies to share experiences and advice, and enables the EHRI PMO to gather and catalog lessons learned
- eOPF Workflow Workgroup that strives to automate HR procedures to improve productivity and eliminate errors
- eOPF Requirements Workgroup that identifies and prioritizes changes to the eOPF solution
- Workforce Analysis Users Group that provides feedback, allows agencies to share experiences, lessons learned, and provides advice to develop new and improved analytic techniques to utilize in the human capital planning process
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Integrating into Your IT Environment
EHRI acknowledges the technological concerns about topics such as security, resource impact, and capacity consideration. The EHRI PMO is available to work with agency IT teams to ensure successful implementations.
Check out the answers to the frequently asked questions from the IT community.
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