Using compliant, repeatable and scalable travel planning solution to dramatically improve operational efficiency

About the customer

Immersion Consulting LLC, a service-disabled veteran-owned business (SDVOSB) and a Siemens partner company, provides business management and technology consulting to government and commercial clients. Immersion specializes in technology, program management, financial management and training services. Immersion’s mission is to provide its clients with sustainable business solutions that yield profitable returns on investments.

One of Immersion’s most important clients is the United States Naval Academy (USNA), a federal service academy in Annapolis, Maryland, that educates and commissions officers for the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. Since 2014, Immersion has been supporting 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 midshipmen’s summer travel, worldwide.

Their challenges

Organizing over 3,000 midshipmen for ship travel to locations around the globe is a dynamic, complex and challenging environment in which the USNA must operate. From acquiring and documenting travel arrangements to managing multiple changes to itineraries and entitlements en route, the process is prone to errors and rework. In many cases, the USNA’s financial systems are unable to generate key travel information in a timely manner. As a result, delays and errors throughout the travel process can result in cost overruns and financial inconveniences to the midshipmen.

To address this challenge, the 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 needed to be able to 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.

Rapidminer Monarch can quickly convert disparate data formats into rows and columns for use in data analytics. The software connects to multiple data sources, including structured and unstructured data, cloud-based data, and big data.

The solution

Rapidminer® Monarch™ software, which is part of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and services, gives end users and managers the ability to leverage data and information already present in their business environment without needing enhancement to systems, interfaces and reports. Using Rapidminer Monarch improves the accuracy and fidelity of finance and accounting data and information used for decision support, while automating complex, highrisk and costly manual business processes.

“Immersion uses Rapidminer Monarch to support many of our federal clients, including the USNA,” says Dan Smalley, founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Immersion Consulting. “It makes it easy for users to access, cleanse and blend data to support better decision-making.

”Rapidminer Monarch is a self-service data transformation tool that can is used to acquire, join, associate, cleanse and combine information from separate data sources. Business rules created within the software enable specialized reporting for decision support to create timely and accurate changes to trip entitlements and costs, as well as updates to traveler information. The ability to receive multiple data sources over live database connections allows new capabilities that far exceed the results of simply combining original information.

Results

Thanks to Rapidminer Monarch, the USNA now has a compliant, repeatable and scalable solution that dramatically improves operational efficiency by producing complete, actionable and prioritized reports. The USNA also improved its operational readiness beyond previous business practices using disparate, static reports and can reduce future costs associated with system enhancement. Moreover, the USNA can add additional, authoritative data sources as needed to correct deficiencies in system reporting.

Automation and enhancement of the data processing steps relieve the burden from the training coordinators and financial managers, who can now focus more on other tasks. Overall, the USNA realized a significant reduction in the total hours required to administer the Midshipmen Summer Training Program. By working with Immersion, who use Rapidminer Monarch, USNA improved the effectiveness of the Midshipmen Summer Travel Program and enhanced the midshipmen’s travel experiences.