Full-Service Moving Project

The Full Service Moving Project (FSMP) was a pilot program run by the Military Traffic Management Command of the U.S. Department of Defense. FSMP provided a new organizational structure for the movement of household goods for members of the United States military. The Pasha Group was a participant in the initial stages of FSMP due to their many years of experience moving military household goods.

One of the cornerstones of FSMP was the Best Value Distribution Database (BVDDb), which tracks all aspects of FSMP activities and provides for the distribution of information updates to FSMP partners. FSMP also provided for electronic payment of FSMP contractors through the PowerTrack system, which is operated by U.S. Bank. The Pasha FSMP application was developed by Eagle Research to interface with the BVDDb, PowerTrack, and Pasha internal systems. Regular and on-demand data updates are received as XML documents from the BVDDb over a secure HTTP connection. Data is then updated in a Pasha in-house movement tracking system, and payment information is sent to PowerTrack via conventional EDI.

Relocation OnTrack

Eagle was invited to provide some support and maintenance for this system shortly after it was deployed at Pasha by another software vendor.

This is a large system which performs critical shipment tracking and billing functions, and has many users at Pasha.

The primary goals of this effort were to improve performance, reliability and usability.

Contact Information System

Hitachi asked us to create an application which would give Hitachi employees world-wide a common web-based directory of contact information about Hitachi executives and business units.

The system includes listings of web sites and telephone numbers for major Hitachi business units, as well as the Hitachi Group Companies Search, which is the system's main repository of contact information.

In addition to the usual contact information, there are listings of products and services by business unit. The application also provides a variety of filtering options for specific Hitachi companies, groups, divisions and/or executives.

Tracking of Animal Assets

Abgenix is a biopharmaceutical company which develops antibody therapeutic products for the prevention and treatment of a variety of disease conditions, including transplant-related diseases, inflammatory and autoimmune disorders, and cancer.

The company relies on proprietary XenoMouse technology to generate human antibodies with fully human protein sequences using genetically engineered strains of mice.

The Tracking of Animal Assets System (TAAS) records the complete life cycle of generations of mice in the XenoMouse development process. The TAAS database also collects information on genetic and immunization testing. Extensive reports allow scientists at Abgenix to monitor the progress of XenoMouse development on the large scale as well as in detail.

TAAS was developed to replace an earlier, more limited system. TAAS offers increased flexibility in the recording of genotype information, more extensive coverage of laboratory procedures, and significant increases in performance and usability over the previous system.

Automated HTML Database Management System

Information Access Company was one of the world's largest owners of database "content." Much of this information was available in databases accessible through Dialog Systems, Compuserve, and other on-line systems.

IAC wanted to develop a system to automatically convert extremely large amounts of text and graphics data from existing formats to a form that would be accessible from the World Wide Web.

This involved several major technical challenges, such as:

-- existing IAC formatting codes needed to be translated to HTML equivalents;

-- the system needed to automatically build two layers of indexes containing hyperlinks to related documents;

-- the amount of information to be converted was so massive that the fastest machine available would have to run for one to two months to convert the first batch of data-this made it necessary to devise a way to allow multiple machines to simultaneously process the data and deposit the results in a single target database;

-- the system had to allow for incremental future updates whereby new articles could be inserted automatically into the database, automatically updating corresponding indexes, and automatically generatiing new HTML index pages when necessary;

-- existing images had to be converted to new graphics formats, with control values generated which would control the location in which the images would appear in the target HTML document.

This system was fully implemented using Oracle for the main database and Delphi as the implementation language.

Reliability Information Management System

The Varian Oncology division manufactures many types of equipment that are widely used for cancer treatment. These machines are quite complex, and the process of tracking reliability of these machines, by sub-assembly and part, is very challenging.

The Reliability Information Management System (RIMS) collects monthly maintenance information for all Varian Oncology equipment in the field, and maintains a large database for these machines and for their maintenance reports.

Extensive reliability statistics are maintained automatically in the database, primarily through the use of stored procedures. A number of complex reports are generated from this database, including Mean-time-before-failure reports, statistics by part number and subassembly, and information on maintenance work by activity code.

Pearl Tracking System

Tahiti Perles is one of the world's major producer of pearls. Tthey contacted Eagle to discuss development of a system which could track all of the details of "pearl farming", from the initial grafting (insertion of mother of pearl "seed" into the oyster) through the harvesting of the fully-developed pearls.

Eagle worked closely with Tahiti Perles to develop a system which meets their unique requirements. Our analysts periodically traveled to Tahiti to spend time at the pearl farms or at Tahiti Perles' main office in order to clearly understand their needs. The result was a system that gradually evolved, through some prototyping and experimentation, to match Tahiti Perles' style of operation.

Spreadsheet Graphing Utility

Bain and Company used large Lotus spreadsheets to perform complex financial analyses for their clients. They needed a system to automatically create five different styles of graphical presentations of this information, including bubble graphs. Most of the graphs contain three dimensions of information.

The system was implemented so that it appeared to the user as an extension of Lotus 123. To produce graphs, the user simply loaded an appropriate spreadsheet, selects the graphing tool, specifies preferences in a dialog box, and clicked"OK".

Online Database Content Preparation System

IAC was one of the largest suppliers of content to some of the major databases available through Compuserve and Dialog Systems. They also supplied content for many CD-ROM titles. Most of this content was from periodicals and was related to the subject areas of aerospace/defense, advertising/marketing, technology, and new products.

The series of projects we performed for IAC were all related to managing the acquisition, editing, and organizing of content which was destined for these databases and CD-ROM titles.