The Office of Personnel Management is starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel on its never-ending journey to modernize its retirement systems.

A pilot to test out a new online retirement application platform is showing promise with several federal payroll providers.

Guy Cavallo, OPM’s chief information officer, said the pilot includes the Agriculture Department’s National Finance Center and several others to reduce both the amount of paper needed and the error rate in processing retirement applications.

Cavallo said the goal of the test is to test out the technology and the process changes and continually improve them. He said there is no specific time frame for how long the pilot will last.

“Part of this is we also have to train and educate all the human resource officials at the agencies on what’s different. We’re taking a slow approach here, but being agile. We’re getting feedback from the initial users now that we will build into the into the updated version,” he said. “Right now, it’s all going to the backlog. We got it launched earlier this year and are having run it through the summer. We want to make sure we get an adequate number of users to get decent feedback, and then we’ll evaluate how it worked.”

“We believe doing the online checking will help really reduce that back and forth that often is needed. We’re also rebuilding the way calculations are done, and we’re implementing a digital file system so that we can stop dealing with millions and millions of pages of paper to be part of retirement,” Cavallo said in an interview with Federal News Network. “It’s going to take many years for us to do this, but by taking the heart of that, we’re improving the way somebody starts to retirement. We’re making sure the calculation service is correct, and then we’re working to get rid of paper versions and move to digital. Those are our first three building blocks.”