Case Study: Army CIO-G6 Cyber Directorate

problem

Our client required a fresh and innovative approach to addressing the several aspects of the Army’s cyber security (CS) and information assurance (IA) processes and infrastructure. Meridian was tasked with refreshing the directorate’s approach to providing CS and IA tasks, including policy development, system engineering (software and hardware), system certification and accreditation, field technical assessments, website development, and executive-support services.

Process

Meridian’s immediate challenge upon assuming responsibility for the contract was to stabilize the existing processes and assess the state of the client’s environment. The incumbent contractor had become stagnant over the previous nine years and had not maintained documentation as processes and technology changed. In all areas, Meridian worked diligently to develop interim processes and deploy the appropriate mix of skills to effectively support ongoing operations.

After stabilizing the existing environment, Meridian’s real work began. To add value for the client, Meridian worked to re-assess the existing processes and technology. This evaluation phase lead to numerous recommendations impacting the expected skill mix, interaction between various working groups and the development of new processes. Meridian’s commercial background contributed heavily to the effort to streamline workflows and drive efficiencies. This efficiency focused commercial mindset also allowed Meridian to deploy value added resources, including an advisory board, at a significantly lower cost than the incumbent contractor.

Results

Better, faster, cheaper—these are core philosophical priorities for Meridian on all engagements. Meridian delivered wins in each of these areas under this contract.

Better: By improving the leadership at the section and program level, Meridian reduced transition risk and was able to retain talented individuals with deep client knowledge. For positions that required new skills, expertise and attitudes, Meridian deployed talented knowledge leaders who brought the client focused, delivery skills required to effectively drive improvements in the contract execution.

Better: Finally, Meridian assembled a team of former military general officers who were provided to the client as an executive advisory board. The advisory board members met regularly to evaluate the contract and government team’s strategies and made recommendations for improvements in the team’s plan. The combination of these success factors lead to a highly successful deployment of a variety of services to the Army CIO-G6 Cyber Directorate.

Faster: At contract inception, the various working groups had little interaction despite performing highly integrated job responsibilities. Meridian suggested several organizational changes which when implemented improved the capacity of Certification & Accreditation team to execute their vast number of required system audits. Many of the incumbent staff members were retained to support ongoing work.

Cheaper: Possibly best of all, Meridian was able to deliver this scope of services at a price point that was lower than the incumbent contractor.

Case Study: Enterprise Project Management Office, CIO Army

problem

Meridian Technologies was engaged with developing process, frameworks and methodologies to stand up an enterprise project-management office for the CIO of the Army. The engagement addressed the following needs:

• Project-management support to individual projects at risk
• Strategic planning and execution
• Framework development
• Methodology development including training

Process

Meridian worked with the CIO office to implement the program needs at all levels with an emphasis on immediate impact for the client. Given strict resource constraints, this included hands-on work in direct project management. Rapid successes through implementing basic budgeting procedures and defining standardized metrics for progress reporting helped Army leadership identify and prioritize weak programs. Technology implementation, including implementing and customizing MS-Project to support the Army’s process also substantially improved the Army CIO’s situational awareness.

Along with implementing processes upon best-practice frameworks, Meridian also focused on providing senior Army staff members with training in project-management methodologies. Weekly training classes were conducted to evangelized the need for and the value of consistent focused Project Management processes.

Summary and Deliverables:

Project related artifacts:

• Estimation and work-breakdown structures
• Project schedules
• Project budgets
• Project issues and risks
• Status reports
• Training program and curriculum

Results

Like any large organization, the Army has tremendous inertia, but by showing value in incremental improvement, the Meridian team helped the Army Office of the CIO drive real change and developed a following that supports the goals of an enterprise program management office.

Case Study : Optimization For Aircraft MRO Operations

Problem

Meridian was contracted to optimize the rebuild part selection process by a company that rebuilds jet engines for the US military. Under the current contract, the company is incentivized to keep engines on the airplane wing for the maximum period of time possible. To complete the engine rebuilds, the company must pull used parts from an extensive inventory which is constrained by regulatory and engineering requirements. The part selection process is further constrained by the remaining partial life of the parts in inventory.

In maintenance, repair and overhaul operations for jet engines, landing gear and other major airframe system, the alignment of life-limited parts can be a significant cost factor. In the case of a jet engine, there are often as many as 28 individual parts which can limit the service life of an engine by triggering a rebuild. If there are significant inventory amounts of each life limited component each with a different remaining life, the combinations to consider are staggering. Incoming engines add additional parts to the mix, and multiple engines are typically overhauled at the same time, which further adds to the complexity.

The cost of misalignment can be quite high. The lowest life-limited part forces an engine to be removed for overhaul, increasing variable maintenance costs and down time. In addition, if the parts are not efficiently aligned, the remaining parts may not be usable for future rebuilds as their left over life span may be relatively low. Many of the life-limited components have a significantly different cost, which adds another constraint to the rebuild process. Throwing away costly parts with left-over life spans of hundreds of hours can be a significant cumulative expense. Over time, this inefficiency translates to unnecessary purchase costs. It also results in increased labor costs as a result of more frequent engine removals and overhauls.

Process

Meridian developed valuation models for life limited parts and designed and developed a software optimization system for managing life limited optimization scenarios using a genetic algorithm. Results have shown that aligning parts across a pool of available inventory can easily increase average time on wing by 50% and reduce the number of engine overhauls by a corresponding amount. In many cases this produces operational savings of millions of dollars per year. The need to purchase new parts is significantly reduced by better utilizing existing parts. This is doubly true in a mature engine model where the supply of existing parts is relatively high.

Results

The software designed by Meridian is easy to integrate into existing inventory-management and asset-management systems. There are well-defined interfaces for loading part configurations, compliance and engineering business rules, and a part inventory. The software can calculate the optimal set of engines to build for a time period taking into consideration regulatory and engineering constraints. Adjusting the proposed schedule adds a new set of constraints and the calculations are re-run. The optimizer is designed to perform calculations in several minutes so the system can be used interactively. The optimizer is also flexible enough to make adjustments as circumstances change during the part inspection and conditioning phases. The software can output the build schedules to a variety of inventory/asset management system so that operations can remain integrated.

Broader Applicability

While Meridian has focused on applying its solution to engine-part optimization, the software and algorithms that are used are applicable to other problem domains where efficient management of life limited parts plays a significant role operational efficiency. An alternative example domain could be landing gear subsystems on airplanes or rotor subsystems on helicopters. The solution is also applicable to other industries.

Case Study : University of Maryland PeopleSoft BI

Problem

The University of Maryland University College (UMUC) is a leading education provider in the state of Maryland. Founded in 1947, and offering a broad range of cutting-edge classes, UMUC has earned a global reputation for excellence as a comprehensive virtual university and for focusing on the unique educational and professional development needs of adult students. To support UMUC’s ongoing efforts to better support it’s student body and comply with regulatory and grant reporting UMUC engaged Meridian to migrate its data warehouse components in support of an upgrade from PeopleSoft 8.0 to 9.0

In preparation for the conversion from PeopleSoft 8.0 to 9.0 UMUC needed to initiate ground-work activities for the migration of data warehouse components to support the conversion project, plan and implement the migration of the data warehouse itself to the Exadata Server, and convert the Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) ETL Maps into the Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) Maps.

After beginning the work, the client required a greatly accelerated timetable to meet new upgrade deadlines;

• Meridian’s initial project was accelerated from four months to just two months.
• At the two-month mark, UMUC expanded the scope of the work because of Meridian’s performance.

Process

Meridian devised an execution plan to migrate the data warehouse components in advance of the planned upgrade to ensure that the data warehouse would support PeopleSoft 9.0 when the upgrade was complete.

To do this, Meridian executed against four distinct project tracks:

• TRACK 1: Assist in the planned migration of the current data warehouse to the Exadata Hardware. The team will provide an advisory role and leverage their experience to tune the data warehouse performance
• TRACK 2: Perform Impact Analysis and BI Readiness for PeopleSoft 8 to 9 upgrade and retirement of legacy data warehouse.
• TRACK 3: Decision to make changes on existing OWB maps for the Track 2 or move them to ODI Framework based on number of maps that are impacted, and make appropriate Implementation Exercise
• TRACK 4: Build a standalone Data Mart to support UMUC Data Mining activities related to grant activities

Meridian delivered a data-management strategy, detailed migration and configuration guide for system interfaces post 9.0 upgrade and extensive system / user testing.

Technology platforms:

The technology used for this project includes:

• PeopleSoft 8.0/9.0 Campus Edition
• Oracle DB
• Various ETL and BI tools

Results

• Met accelerated production deadlines
• Satisfied user and system testing

Case Study : Foreign Military Sales

Problem

The Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) with the Department of Defense (DOD) manages the sale and distribution of U.S. military equipment to other countries. The current Foreign Military Sales (FMS) system is a decades-old legacy system. The DOD is in the process of replacing this legacy system with an Oracle ERP platform. Lacking a viable analytics, reporting and data-integration solution, Meridian built an enterprise data-management platform to source and provision data for the ERP, and to provide the analytics and reporting by the FMS user community.

Process

Meridian was engaged by the DOD to architect, design and build a new enterprise-data-warehouse platform as part of its Oracle ERP implementation. In order for the DSCA to deploy their new ERP system, they needed a data aggregation and reporting platform which would acquire data from over 20 new and legacy source systems, provide reporting, BI, analytics, and feeds to new and legacy ERP systems and their user communities. Meridian leveraged its unique expertise with several technology platforms, including Ab Initio, Oracle, QlikView and SSRS.

Results

Meridian’s Data Management and Reporting Solution (DMRS) is providing the data integration, reporting and business intelligence capabilities required to support new FMS business processes. FMS users are equipped with enhanced and more timely information to support sales of military equipment to foreign governments.