Project - The project involved assisting a large aerospace and defense contractor with several site specific transitions from dozens of legacy systems to SAP. Over the course of the project Creek Systems participated in the development of SAP training materials, project tracking for training materials, course scheduling, website design and maintenance, managing the transactional and process help documents, design and maintenance of a team newsletter, and involvement in change management communications aimed at assisting the client’s system end-users in accomplishing a smooth transition from their old (known) systems to a new (unknown) system. Many thousands of employees were impacted.

Client Challenge - The challenge was to assess the client’s social environment, technical requirements and limitations, and identify established human resource communication channels to determine the best means of communication/flow-down to end-users. Part of the challenge was the wide disparity in the client’s end-user computer knowledge. End-users ranged from systems programmers to shop floor personnel unfamiliar with using computers and requiring practice to double-click a mouse. Technical requirements involved getting up-to-speed with numerous software programs already selected for the program and becoming familiar with the corporate hardware and software limitations. For example, Websites were maintained on a UNIX system while all documents (including HTML files) were created on PCs using Windows. This rendered various software automated processes useless as they were designed to function from Windows to Windows and not Windows to UNIX (and even if the programs could “talk to each other” there was an additional issue of UNIX security levels that required manual password inputs).

Creek Systems Solution - The solution was the development of a project specific website which Creek Systems was able to create within the framework of the client’s web template. The main purpose of the website was to be a “one-stop-shop” for end-user project information. Creek Systems then designed and implemented a help documentation library that is accessible from the project website. The library was established to be a central project document repository managed by a gatekeeper. Working closely with the client and involving numerous departments, Creek Systems created training courses, lunch-time learning sessions, website bulletins, a means for submitting questions via the website, a project newsletter, and a contact list of all team members and system power users which is also available from the website. Creek Systems taught a computer basics course to help end-users get up to speed with the client’s computers.

To transfer web files from Windows to UNIX Creek Systems used a program that can make the two operating systems “talk to each other.” The project library includes SAP transactional documentation developed in InfoPak, process documents, and process flows. The library currently contains over 2,500 documents. Web surveys were completed and metrics tallied to determine the usability of the website and refine it for easier end-user usability. The power user community was tapped to help flow-down timely communications and help end-users become more familiar with the project website and project library.

Project - The project was to assist a large Aerospace contractor in transitioning legacy mainframe data to SAP. Examples of the data included material master records, bills of material, storeroom inventory, work in process, and purchase orders. Thousands of employees were impacted.

Client Challenge - The challenge was to understand the intended purpose of SAP data and determine the most appropriate legacy field, despite the vastly different data structure. The data within the legacy system required a significant amount of “cleansing” and validation. In some instances custom extracts, complete with additional validation, and the assignment of values to meet SAP load requirements, were necessary.

Creek Systems Solution - The solution involved Creek Systems leveraging of legacy system subject matter expertise, as well as, a good understanding of ERP systems in order to provide the client with the appropriate data. This included not only mapping documents but the writing of functional designs that specified how a file is to be assembled from a myriad of sources to meet unique requirements. The project also included the writing of functional requirements for changes to the legacy system to reduce the number of new data anomalies.

Project - The project was to assist a major defense contractor with their reporting systems. The reporting systems are required to provide many pieces of information over many spans of time, across many products and services. The reporting tools used must be scalable, efficient and highly transparent so that information derived from them, can be easily tracked back to the sources. BusinessObjects technology was chosen to be that tool suite and expertise in the product was by default, a required component. BusinessObjects was mandated as the replacement reporting tool to supersede all legacy reporting tools across the global corporation with their largest business unit being the first to implement.

Client Challenge - Many legacy systems used throughout the years across several business acquisitions, provided varying configurations and functionalities that needed duplication in the new tool. Legacy systems were plagued with inefficiencies and embedded code that made reverse engineering a nightmare. Add to the complex array of legacy systems, historical references on the original reports was lost over time with retiring employees and others who found new direction in other business units or companies. In some cases, age of the report over tenures was simply the biggest factor. Support includes enterprise wide system upkeep, as well as troubleshooting the bugs and intricacies of the newest version of the new tool.

Creek Systems Solution - This major defense contractor engaged Creek Systems and subsequently enlisted the expertise of several Business Intelligence consultants to expedite the implementation of BusinessObjects technologies across one of their largest business units. Deploying highly experienced resources, from Creek Systems, this major defense contractor are now realizing quick successes and improved efficiency over the legacy reporting applications. As a result, the remaining business units will soon follow and take advantage of the benefits of BusinessObjects being their primary reporting platform.

Project - The project was to assist a major defense contractor in updating and maintaining a suite of over 300 internal web applications. The client uses the applications to manage every aspect of their business, from tracking engineering process, to production lines, and HR related issues. The applications utilized a wide array of development technologies including proprietary and open source solutions, application development frameworks and ORMs.

Client Challenge - The challenge was to provide experienced personnel that were able to not only understand the breadth of business requirements met by the application suite but who also possessed the technical ability to develop new code to augment functionality in a wide variety of web development technologies.

Creek Systems Solution - The solution was to leverage years of experience in a broad spectrum of requirements in various industries. Working closely with client end users, Creek Systems deployed their Software Engineers to refine customer requirements and successfully develop many new versions of existing applications. Our key success to the solution was the extent of Creek System experience in various backgrounds including DBMS, Java frameworks and ORMs

Project - The project is to develop and implement multiple Balanced Scorecards (BSCs) in support of a large defense client. The scorecards focused on the new organizational behaviors that were needed by the client and their support organization that was providing IT outsourcing support. New governance structures and relationships are being put in place and this set of BSCs would be used to drive the needed new behaviors for both the client and support organization management teams as they step into new territory.

Client Challenge - The challenge is to extract the key summary behaviors required by the stakeholders, and then develop the behavior driving metrics that can tell, quickly whether or not the new behaviors are happening or not. Since IT organizations are very use to thinking in terms of Service Level Agreements as the controlling definition of performance this behavior based approach takes some getting use to.

Creek Systems Solution - The solution involves are series of workshops, face to face where possible, and going through a structured process starting with some high level questions like “Where’s the pain?” and then driving down to behaviors, and eventually metrics that reflect the desired behaviors. The “Balance” in a BSC is in the weightings across the various categories of behavior/metrics in a way that holds a tension between competing objectives, a key though often ignored aspect of outsourcing contracts. What shows up in the final product often surprises the stakeholders with a mix of standard SLA type metrics, but some deeper behavioral metrics like bringing innovation, and partnership to the relationship, in a measurable way.

Project - A leading provider of automotive financial services required transition of Information Technology support services based on a mix of in-house and vendor provided services to a Service Provider support model. The scope of the project included migrating Service Management disciplines in Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, Release Management, Capacity Management and Asset & Configuration Management, in addition to general service offerings in IT infrastructure support.

Client Challenge - IT services needed to be migrated and operational within a contractual 4 month timetable. 75% of the original IT staff was also to be replaced with the new Service Provider company. Documented policy and procedures existed but some information critical to the transition were ‘tribal knowledge’ and a significant amount of knowledge transfer needed to take place to ensure a smooth transition of services. Furthermore, a substantial redesign of processes as well as deployment of new IT Service Management tool was necessary for conformance to ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) best practices.

Creek Systems Solution - The solution involved retaining key ‘high value’ Creek employed staff members with a solid understanding of the IT Service Support and Service Delivery process with respect to ITIL best practices. Creek staff was critical in the knowledge transfer, training of new IT staff members, fine tuning of tools and processes and reporting to management on the efficiency and performance of the operational environment. Creek resource was instrumental in minimizing risks during the transition and ensuring a smooth transition of services to the business customer.