Logistics Planning System
Craytek upgraded a logistics and inventory management planning system for the U.S. Navy by converting it to a modern Java web application and increased its reporting capability to produce PDF, XML, and Excel file formats. The new application provides tabular, charts and dashboard reports. The functionality of the entire application was expanded to handle multiple agency lines of business rather than a single business. This was achieved by generalizing the implementation to create a framework that was flexible enough to support the specifics of each business.
Customer Challenge
The customer asked Craytek to improve upon and standardize the system’s reports, provide XML import and export of schedule data, fix data validation/conflict issues, and expand the system to support other agency lines of business. In addition, stakeholders wanted to devise a way to ease the process of comparing and coordinating multiple discrete plans, as the plans were complex and difficult to coordinate between stakeholders.
How Craytek Helped
Craytek coordinated with agency business line managers, planner staff and prominent stakeholders using Business Genetics software and eXtended Business Modeling Language to model the business processes and data entities to be codified.
Craytek also coordinated with agency IT staff regarding network infrastructure requirements involving the Oracle database, Microsoft Active Directory services, Java application server and related components. We met the challenge by creating a plan editor/viewer with advanced data validation that provides visual comparisons against other plans, integrating a commercial reports generator with expansive formatting capabilities, building a comprehensive plan management user interface, and providing multi-level configuration of business resources, schedule events and the associations between them.
Results Achieved
Craytek’s solution delivered powerful ad hoc query, reporting and analysis capabilities, with XML data interchange capability, document promulgation support, and flexibility to configure the system for additional or future business.
The Navy agency now has secure, reliable access to the critical resource and scheduling data they need to make the right planning decisions, using a single logistics and inventory management planning system capable of being used for planning multiple business lines. And the new system is equipped for eventual multi-user access, to allow stakeholders to more easily collaborate on planning changes with less effort, and to support future collaboration strategies.