Improving Operational Efficiency with the United States Naval Academy Midshipmen Summer Travel Program

United States Naval Academy (USNA)

Since 2014, Immersion Consulting has been supporting United States Naval Academy (USNA) efforts to improve the operational efficiency of the Midshipmen Summer Travel Program. The focus is on achieving compliant, repeatable and sustainable processes for planning and executing Navy midshipmen summer travel, worldwide.

Challenge

Organizing over 3,000 midshipmen for ship travel to locations around the globe is a dynamic, complex and challenging environment in which the United States Naval Academy (USNA) must operate. From acquiring and documenting travel arrangements to managing multiple changes to itineraries and entitlements en route, the process is high-risk for human error and often requires re-work. At times, financial and logistical systems are unable to generate key travel information in a timely manner. As a result, delays and errors across the travel process can result in cost overruns and financial inconveniences to the travelers.

The Complexity

To address this challenge, USNA required a proven solution with the capability to acquire, associate, join, cleanse, and produce coherent, and accurate reports used to support travel management decisions. The solution must support structured data and information produced by multiple, disparate systems, within reference tables and flat files, as well as unstructured data and information present in forms, documents and artifacts.

The Solution

Altair® Monarch® provides end users and managers capability and functionality to leverage data and information already present in their business environment, without enhancement to systems, interfaces and reports. Monarch improves accuracy and fidelity of finance and accounting data and information used for decision support, while helping to automate complex, high-risk and costly manual business processes.

The US Naval Academy Solution: Altair® Monarch®

Working closely with the client end users to build and incorporate specific travel business rules to work with inherent software logic, Monarch is a self-service data transformation solution that can acquire, join, associate, cleanse and combine information from separate data sources.

Business rules created within the tool enable specialized reporting for decision support to effect timely and accurate changes to trip, entitlements and costs, as well as updates to traveler information. Monarch is able to process complex logic statements which includes “data cleansing,” machine processing time is significantly reduced.

The ability to receive multiple data sources over live database connections allows new capabilities that far exceed the results of simply combining original information. As a result, the USNA is able to add additional, authoritative data sources to correct deficiencies in system reporting that have incomplete data attributes. Automation and enhancement of the data processing steps relieves the burden from the training coordinators and financial managers, who could then focus more on other tasks.

The USNA now has a compliant, repeatable and scalable solution that dramatically improves operational efficiency by producing complete, actionable, and prioritized reports. USNA is able to reduce future cost associated with system enhancement, and has improved its operational readiness beyond previous business practices using disparate, static reports.

Overall, USNA has realized a significant reduction in the total hours required to administer the Midshipmen Summer Training Program. By implementing Monarch, USNA not only improved the effectiveness of the Midshipmen Summer Travel Program, but they also enhanced their midshipmen’s travel experiences.