New records viewing system improves access to unit records

  • Published
  • By Maj. Beth Kelley Horine
  • Air Force Personnel Center Public Affairs
Air Force Personnel Center officials will release the new Personnel Records Display Application--or PRDA--in early April. PRDA is an electronic viewer for the Automated Records Management System, facilitating search, retrieval and management of personnel records in ARMS through a role based access process.

"PRDA greatly enhances leadership's ability to accomplish personnel actions on their Airmen by reducing the time spent tracking down records, reports and career data--ultimately giving our supervisors and commanders time back to do their primary job," said Maj. Gen. K.C. McClain, AFPC commander.

One of AFPC's Virtual Personnel Services Center new initiatives, PRDA provides a role-based function to allow commanders, supervisors, first sergeants and other approved positions access to view enlisted and officer personnel records in ARMS for the performance of their official duties. Currently, ARMS only allows electronic record viewing by the individual service member and a small number of military personnel experts.

"PRDA will provide much wider access to personnel records, based on approved roles in the member's chain-of-command," said Christine Stingley, a senior specialist in AFPC's Personnel Services directorate.

"In some cases, the access and/or jurisdiction to view records will have to be manually assigned by base PRDA administrators, while in other cases, the access is given automatically to certain positions based on data in the Military Personnel Data System," Ms. Stingley added.

Automatically, PRDA gives access to the member, the member's rater, senior rater, command chief master sergeant, wing commander, group commander, squadron commander and first sergeant. Base PRDA administrators can also manually load access for other approved leadership positions, like unit PRDA administrators, human resource specialists, investigators, legal personnel, superintendents, acting first sergeants and for division, branch and section chiefs.

"Global, base and unit administrators of the program are being trained to scrutinize and actively control access to only those people in a member's leadership chain who have an official need to view the record," Ms. Stingley said. "Protection of personally identifiable information is an ingrained feature of PRDA and the training of PRDA role based administrators," she added.

"If all goes well, PRDA will eventually become the primary records viewing system for military personnel records in the Air Force. ARMS will continue to be used by deployment locations" Ms. Stingley added.

For more information on PRDA, contact your base Military Personnel Section's Customer Support Section, or visit the Personnel Services Delivery homepage and handbook by searching for "PSD Handbook" in the Ask AFPC Web site.Â